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CaiBtRIGIfr DEPOSm 



0£ VEN one-thousandths, 
^ three one -thousandths, 
one one -thousandth — one 
record after another was 
passed. 

At last a wire was drawn 
that measured one four- 
thousandth of an inch in 
diameter — twelve times finer 
than the hair on your head. 

The spider, so long counted 
a master workman, had been 
outdone." 




John A. Roebling 

FOUNDER OF JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS COMPANY 



OUTSPINNING 
THE SPIDER 



THE STORY OF WIRE 
AND WIRE ROPE 



By 

John Kimberly Mumford 



PUBLISHED BY 

Robert L. Stillson Co, 

New York 






Copyright, 1921, by 

Robert L. Stillson Company 
New York 



,1^'^ 



/ 




-3 1922 



g)G!.A654401 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

CHAPTER I 
WIRE AND MODERN LIFE 

It is the wire age. 

Modern life, in all its intricate bearings, runs 
on wire. Wire everywhere; in the heavens 
above, the earth beneath and the waters under 
the earth. In all the legerdemain of science, 
which has put nature in bondage, wire is the 
indispensable agent. 

A curious, slow, finical little trade at which 
the smiths of forgotten races toiled and 
pottered and ruined their eyesight for unnum- 
bered thousands of years has become, within 
less than a century, under the spur of modern 
need and modern driving power, the pack- 
bearer of the world and the mainspring of 
every activity from the cradle to the grave. 

Wire still makes toys and gewgaws as it 
always did, but it is no longer the plaything of 

[6] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

vanity alone. Cancel wire and wire rope and 
their concomitant, "flat wire," from the in- 
ventory of human assets tomorrow, and the 
world would stop stock-still. 

WIRE AND THE 
COMMUTER 

This is not hyperbole. Picture yourself start- 
ing for business in the morning if there were no 
wire and see what the verdict would be by 
quitting time. Considering the vital part that 
wire plays in the growing and transportation 
of food for man and beast, it is likely you would 
go breakfastless after sleeping on a bed without 
springs or the luxury of a woven wire mattress. 
But that would be only the beginning of sorrow. 
The trolley would stand dead. Perhaps you 
are a commuter and journey to town by steam 
road. The ferry would hug its slip, and where 
is the railroader who in these days of conges- 
tion and short headway would dare to send a 
train out without the protection of the little 
lengths of bonding wire between the rails, that 
articulate the block signal system? 

You could telephone the office? How and 
over what unless wire were used? Wireless? 
Without the coils and armatures that keep the 
instruments going or the aerials that seize the 

[6] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 



iiii 




^^' 



WITHOUT WIRE— NO WIRELESS 



[7] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

word wave in its flight, there would be no 
wireless. 

Suppose you managed to get there. With- 
out wire rope no insurance company would 
let an elevator get higher than the second story, 
and you couldn't signal the elevator anyway, 
for the annunciator operates only by an in- 
genious system of wires, and the control is even 
more complex. 

You can climb the stairs, but the door key 
is flat wire and the shank on which the knob 
turns is square wire and half the lock is wire. 
More trouble. The buttons on your suit are 
flat wire; so are your garters. As for the stenog- 
rapher, if she got there at all — for she is as 
completely wired as a telegraph system, from 
her hat to her shoes — the index files and office 
books and letter hooks and much of the other 
equipment of the office would fall to pieces 
without wire, and the machine which is her 
pride and the symbol of her dominion is about 
all wire of one kind or another, except the frame. 

Distinctly, it would not be your busy day. 
You might spend it looking out of the window 
at the ships going down the river, but un- 
happily, the majestic liner is compact of wire, 
from her glistening trucks to the deepest 

18] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

shadows of the engine room ; or airplanes soaring 
and swaying above the teeming town and far- 
stretched waterways. But an airplane lives by 
wire. It could neither fly nor steer nor even 
hold together if its frame were not strung with 
wire and its wings and ailerons and fuselage 
bound and braced and its machinery vitalized 
by divers forms of wire and wire strand and 
woven wire cord. 

Far over the town and across the Jerseys you 
would see columns of smoke rising from busy 
factories — save that the mines of coal and the 
wells of oil are both dependent for every atom 
of their product on wire rope, and the lumber 
and metals which are the bases of industrial 
manufacture are in the same boat. And as for 
electric light — you might linger till dark but 
turning the switch wouldn't help, for the big 
subterranean cables and the multitude of littler 
wires that make a pathway for the current, 
even the dynamos with their masses of wire, 
they were all dead long ago. 

Gas? Made of coal and oil. There would 
be nothing left to do but to grope hungry 
through dark streets and, if you could find a 
wireless bridge, go back to Lonelyhurst, where 
you would learn that without wire there is no 

[9] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

domestic joy in this earthly tabernacle, for 
from cellar to roof, from the bale and rim of 
the coal-scuttle and the binding of the broom, 
from the cooking pots, the dishpan and all 
other culinary utensils to the baby's toys and 
mother's corset and hairpins and needles and 
safety pins and pins, it is all wire one way or 
another. The family would never know what 
time you got home, for the watches and clocks 
are largely wire; and there would be no possible 
relief in going to the club, for nobody would 
have a car that would run— or a cork-screw, 
even in the dark. 

WIRE HOLDS 

THE WORLD TOGETHER 

It is wire that has brought the world together 
and holds it together, and when the wire mills 
stop, as even they would have to do if there 
were no wire, modern civilization might as 
well be dead, and it would be. Even war 
would peter out. Populations might perish 
from hunger and probably would, but they'd 
have to stop killing each other except by 
primitive methods, for without wire, which 
controls the movement of ships and airplanes 
and submarines, and permits by telegraph and 
telephone the manoeuvering of prodigious armies 

[10] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

and binds the shining bodies of great guns 
and makes most of the instruments of pre- 
cision for aiming them, war would no longer 
offer much chance for machine-made glory. 
As a guarantee of perpetual and world-wide 
peace no League of Nations could begin to 
compare with the elimination of wire from the 
world's catalogue of weapons. 

Wire is an influential member of that family 
of material giants which have come into great- 
ness within a relatively short time but which 
none the less weigh heavily in the destinies of 
mankind. It is old, too, but until a new demon 
of material ambition began to stir in crowding 
populations it had little purpose except to adorn 
the raiment of the great or add richness to 
ancient arts. People whose vision of man's 
past is bounded by the encyclopedia have 
been told times enough that Aaron's robe had 
gold wire threads in it, that there was wire in 
the pyramids, that Nineveh was beating out 
wire eight hundred years before the tragedy of 
Calvary, and that metal heads with hair of 
wire were found in the ruins of Herculaneum 
and are now again entombed in the showcases 
of the Portici Museum. 

fill 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

THE AGE-LONG 
USE OF WIRE 

In a world chasing the present and future 
dollar ethnology moves slowly; the encyclopedias 
have not yet told that pre-Inca Peru, hiding in 
its tombs the secrets of a vanished civilization, 
has now given up garments gleaming with woven 
metal, which show their makers to have been 
past masters ages ago in the wire-beater's art, 
and to have spun the wire on woolen filaments 
in the self same way of lamination in which 
Paris does it for the uniforms of haughty major 
generals today. 

And yet, down to the century when the 
popes were ruling from Avignon, when Rienzi 
was raising hob in the streets of Rome and 
titles of nobility were being won on the bloody 
fields of Crecy and Poictiers and Bannockburn, 
none of the many metal workers, through all 
the ages and in all the lands, ever had a notion 
he could draw metal through a die to make a 
wire. They hammered and hammered through 
the ages and sliced the filaments off as a cobbler 
cuts leather shoestrings— or used to. And then 
it was a German that did it, for the ancient 
records of Nuremberg and Augsberg tell of a 
"wire drawer" and later on one Rudolf had a 

[12] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

wire mill at Nuremberg. The chances are that 
Rudolf was a capitalist and that the inventor 
sold him the invention for a pot of beer, and 
grumbled for the rest of his medieval days 
after the manner of his kind. 

Six centuries have gone since then, and in a 
world of wire it is safe to say, on the strength 
of some inquiry, that ninety per cent of the 
people whose lives and well being hang on wire 
from one year's end to another have no more 
knowledge of how drawn wire is made than the 
Egyptian who hammered out his quota in the 
days of old Rameses. 

THE BEGINNING OF THE 
WIRE AGE 

England and France, quick to see what the 
process meant, even to the slow commerce of 
those times, fussed away for another three 
hundred years, trying to perfect methods of 
wire drawing to the point of independence in 
the trade, but it was a stern chase. "Iron 
wire," for all utility wire in the beginning was 
drawn from Swedish iron, was beginning to 
take up a share of the white man's burden. 
Gold and silver and platinum and bronze were 
still favored in ornamental use, but for prac- 
tical purposes iron refused to be displaced. 

[13] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

Great Britain essayed in 1750 the making of 
wire from steel for musical purposes, but to 
1769 Broadwood was still sticking to German 
iron and even in 1790 was still buying wire from 
Pohlman in Nuremberg. So Bavaria, where 
first the idea of drawing metal had been hatched, 
was still leading the world in its craft. 

Little by little, for the tide of industrial 
activity had barely begun to rise, new uses 
were found for wire. In one field after another 
it supplanted vegetable fibre where strength 
and durability were essential. As the world 
began to feel the Nineteenth Century surge 
of mechanical impulse, as life developed new 
facets and new needs, science sought new means 
of meeting them, and in the quest itself grew. 
Producing methods advanced with the new 
demands of invention. Always the wire makers 
spun their filaments a little finer. Men were 
weighing zephyrs and measuring the infini- 
tesimal, and needed tools of increasing delicacy. 
Wire was the answer. 

Electricity, so long hidden from under- 
standing, was led captive by a wire, not by a 
chain — and with its development wire has 
found a new and increasingly important role. 
The ductility of metals was at last being tested 

[14] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




DREDGING 



15 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

to the full. Seven one-thousandths, three one- 
thousandths, one one-thousandth — one record 
after another was passed. At last, by way 
of curiosity, a wire was drawn that measured 
one four-thousandth of an inch in diameter — 
twelve times finer than the hair on your head. 
The spider, so long counted a master workman, 
had been undone. 

The wire age was arriving— big wires to 
carry the world's heavy loads; fine wire to 
solve its molecular problems. The day of the 
hammer was done. 



[16J 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 



CHAPTER II 
THE PIONEER 

Since Columbus the centuries have been 
gathering speed. At first it came slowly, for 
the need was not yet. Today a thought is 
born and tomorrow it is a giant, parting seas 
and moving mountains. The waste of yester- 
day is turned into the raw material of new 
manufacture, with its million wheels moving 
faster and faster. But back of it all, inevitably 
and eternally, is a busy human brain and un- 
satisfied energy. 

Wire rope had lingered, waiting for civili- 
zation's loads to grow. The artisans of old 
had woven cut wires together to make the 
trinkets of their time, little dreaming of the 
might that lay hidden in the fibres of the iron, 
and their world went on hoisting stone for its 
pyramids by prodigious multiplication of garlic- 
fed man-power. It seems strange to the high- 
speed mind of today that five hundred years 
could have passed, after the drawing of wire 
was invented, before necessity put it into the 

[17] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

mind of a wire-drawer that with wire, as with 
other things, strength lay in union. And yet 
the human race had been making rope since 
the morning stars sang together. 

In 1831, when France was picking herself up 
from the dirt and disorder of another revolution 
and the German princes were strangling in the 
universities the growing call for "liberty and 
union," young men of brains and ambition 
began to leave the German states for America, 
where there was free air and elbow room. 

JOHN A. ROEBLING 
COMES TO AMERICA 

In a company of such, John A. Roebling 
journeyed from Muhlhausen in Saxony, and 
took up a tract of land in western Pennsylvania. 
He carried a degree of civil engineer from the 
Royal University in Berlin; but there were 
"back-to-the-landers" even in those days, and 
he set about farming in the thrifty German way, 
founding for nucleus a little town which at 
first was named Germania, but afterward came 
to be called Saxonburg. 

Fate seems to have ordained that Roebling's 
engineering skill should not remain fettered to a 
Pennsylvania plow handle. The system of 
canals and portages which afterward evolved 

[181 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

and merged and built itself into the Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad was digging its ditches and dams 
and building haulways through the obstinate 
distances of that hard-ribbed state, past the 
hopeful hamlet of Saxonburg and fatefuUy under 
the eyes of the young German engineer. The 
result was never in doubt. He abandoned the 
plow to his compatriots and plunged into the 
problems of construction, where he belonged. 

HAULING CANAL BOATS 
UP THE PORTAGE RAILWAY 

The skeptic who scoffs at fatalism will find 
it difficult to explain why the particular en- 
gineering work that was brought to Roebling's 
door should involve the weary hauling of the 
Pennsylvania Canal's boats up the Portage 
Railway, which Bertrand, one of Napoleon's 
generals, had built to overcome the Pennsyl- 
vania ridges; or why, just as the bulk and 
clumsiness and inefficiency of the huge hemp 
cables were eating into his active mind, a 
casual paper from Germany should convey the 
fact that some fellow in Freiburg in Saxony — 
where wire drawing had birth — had made a 
strong rope by twisting wires together. 

What man had done man could do. If there 
was a place to test the efficacy of wire rope with 

[19] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

its increased strength and diminishing size, it 
was the Portage Railway. So the Saxonburg 
wheatfield was turned into a ropewalk. Ceres 
made way for Vulcan. The neighbors, as soon 
as material could be shipped in from the Falls 
of the Beaver River, where wire drawing was 
done, found themselves under young Roebling's 
direction twisting wires, with rude appliances 
for torsion, into a fabric which had never been 
made or seen or probably heard of in America 
before, but which was destined, in a com- 
paratively short time, to change the face of 
industry. 

WIRE ROPE PROVES 
ITS PULLING POWER 

It is easy to imagine the caustic comments of 
the Pennsylvania countryside, and the fore- 
bodings with which the pioneer installed his 
cables on what was then a conspicuous engineer- 
ing labor. But it worked. Engineering audacity, 
plus scientific skill and native faculty for doing 
things, solved the problem of the Portage, but 
it did far more than that. The fame of it was 
sown broadcast and the orders for wire rope 
came flooding from all that fast opening country. 
Roebling had found his job. Destiny had him 
by the collar and he bade farming good-bye. 

[20] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 



/ 




HOISTING A BATTLESHIP TOWER WITH WIRE ROPE 



[21] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

It was in 1840 that the first Roebling rope 
was finished. Eight years later, the year when 
the revolution burst forth in the Teutonic 
empires, he moved his plant and its business 
to Trenton, and began forthwith to build the 
foremost wire rope factory in the world. 

Nothing can be more amusing or reveal more 
clearly what brains and energy have been able 
to accomplish in the arena of American oppor- 
tunity than to contrast the picture of the 
first Roebling factory in Trenton, which sug- 
gests the rudest of farmsteads, with the sky- 
piercing chimneys and the mile or more of 
many-windowed brick buildings in and around 
the Jersey capital today, where the Roebling 
work is done. 

The three big factory groups which have 
grown from the shabby little buildings of 1848 
are the fruit of intelligence and ceaseless en- 
deavor, but they are reared primarily on a 
basis of manufacturing honor, and ruled by 
the general thesis that forever and ever quality 
comes before price. This means keeping faith 
with the structural iron worker, swinging pigmy- 
small five hundred feet above the din of the 
city streets; with the sailor, the miner, the 
rigger; with the hurrying multitude that packs 

[22] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

the elevators in tall buildings, and with the 
aviator, to whom a breaking wire may spell 
death. 

That is the reason the Roebling Company 
has outgrown the limits of Trenton in the last 
decade and a half and with its overflow founded 
a city of its own; that is the reason why 
Roebling has almost got into the Thesaurus as a 
synonym for wire in every civilized language 
under the sun. 

It is wire, from the huge three -inch cable 
that pulls the loads of mountain haulways 
or moves the thousand cars of a city transit 
system, down to the gossamer that jingles the 
bell in the telephone or the infinitesimal hair 
that in the eyepiece of a telescope helps the 
astronomer to mark the movement of a distant 
world. There is hardly a thing in the nature 
of wire, round, flat or irregular, that the 
Roeblings do not manufacture or have not at 
some time manufactured, whether for the world's 
standard uses or the numberless special pur- 
poses hidden in inventive minds. 

A TWELVE MILLION POUND DEVELOPMENT i 

FROM A FIFTY POUND BEGINNING 

"I've come to see," said an old man at the 
Roebling offices one day, "if you'd go to the 

[23] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

trouble on a very small order to find out just 
what composition I need in a wire for a patent 
IVe got." 

And they did. It took the chemists and the 
experts some time to work out the problem of 
resistances, and the old man ordered fifty pounds. 
The next year he ordered a hundred more. 
There was no profit in it, but they made it and 
looked pleasant. They were specialists in wire 
and they were simply keeping faith with their 
job. 

The following year the visitor called again. 
"I don't want any more of that wire,*' he 
grinned, "I've sold my patent to So-and-So," 
naming one of the biggest manufacturing con- 
cerns in the world, **but I want to see some 
royalties and I made it a condition of the sale 
that they order this wire from you on the for- 
mula that I got." 

In a recent 12 months period Roeblings 
fabricated more than 5,000,000 pounds of that 
wire. 



If it's wire, the Roeblings make it. All that 
was in the mind of the man who seventy years 

[24] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

ago was twisting the first rope in Saxonburg. 
He was more than an engineer; he was a sane 
and far-seeing mind in business. As soon as 
possible after establishing the factory in Trenton 
he added a mill for the manufacture of his own 
wire. It gave him a product that he knew from 
the pig iron up, and it saved a profit, besides 
extending to a marked degree the scope of the 
business. He knew, when he put the cable on 
the Portage haulway in 1840, that the mission 
of wire, in the world that was then making, 
would be boundless, and from the very start 
he was the explorer in new fields for wire, a 
builder, a seeker for problems that wire might 
solve, archapostle of the power of wire, in one 
form or another, to do the heaviest labor of 
mankind. 

Wire rope, spreading its field of utility ever 
wider and wider, carried with ease and safety 
loads that had broken the back of hemp; it 
took the place of solid steel in numerous phases 
of construction, and when its adaptability was 
proven new tasks were devised for it. Wire 
rope was the forerunner of "Safety First." It 
cancelled large burdens of expense; it set a new 
record in facility of construction. 

[25] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

AMERICA'S FIRST 
WIRE CABLEWAY 

Persistently militant, from the day of his 
first achievement, in the promotion of wire rope, 
John A. Roebling was the first engineer to intro- 
duce into America the novelty of a wire cable- 
way, which with an ingenious carriage he em- 
ployed to transport across a river the materials 
he needed in the construction of a bridge. This 
method of haulage, over streams and gorges, 
down from high mountains to cars or boats in 
the valley below, up from the deep-sunken beds 
of rich placers — everywhere and in all sorts of 
places where Nature seemed to have set up 
impassable defense against those who would 
take away her treasures —came forthwith into 
widespread use, and is among the handy tools 
of engineers throughout the world today. The 
Roebling Company established these cable- 
ways in many countries. It had in operation 
around the globe no less than twenty different 
types, including log rigs and gravity planes for 
mountain railways, and the demand for wire 
rope was increased thereby a thousand fold 
before the new century had come in. 

[26] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

ROEBLING TURNS HIS 
ATTENTION TO BRIDGES 

The age of wire was marching rapidly, but 
John A. Roebling had set a distant mark. In 
the mountains of Peru, India and other lands 
for ages the natives have made use of bridges 
made of vines, to cross appalling chasms. As 
time went on and arts progressed the principle 
was applied through the agency of hemp ropes 
and chains, and men of small imagination 
thought that in these the limit had been at- 
tained. But Roebling's faith was as the faith 
of the Moslem in the Prophet. He believed 
that in wire the solution of all the pesky prob- 
lems of bridge-building had been found. In a 
small way the thing was obvious, but his ambi- 
tion never stopped there. He believed, and had 
believed ever since he made the first rope, that 
a major bridge made up of wires of scrupu- 
lously high quality, constructed with rigorous 
regard for scientific tenets, would carry with 
ease and indefinitely any reasonable traffic that 
might be imposed on it. 

Famous engineers said he was a visionary 
and a hobbyist; still with force and tenacity he 
urged his contention until at last the engineer- 
ing world was compelled to give heed to him. 

[27] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

In the face of such opposition, and in view of 
the centuries that had dragged by before wires 
were twisted into rope, it is remarkable that so 
soon after his initial experiment he should have 
worked out in practical entirety the plan of 
bridge construction which came to its climax 
in the spanning of the East River. 

Between 1840, when he made his first rope, 
and 1844, he had not only perfected his theory 
of wire bridges but in spite of furious opposi- 
tion had built one as an aqueduct for the old 
Pennsylvania Canal, the basins of which were 
at Pittsburg. This was followed by four more 
suspension aqueducts for the Delaware and 
Hudson Canal Co. Having espoused a theory 
he let no grass grow under his feet. He cast 
about vigorously for bridges to build. He found 
an opening in Cincinnati. 

THE OHIO RIVER BRIDGE 
AT CINCINNATI 

River traffic along the Ohio, in the forties, 
was still a big factor in business but was con- 
testing tooth and nail the advance of the rail- 
ways, and fought bitterly against the right of 
the invaders to build bridges over the water- 
ways. The steamboat men said bridge piers 

[28] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




LOGGING— HANDLING BIG FELLOWS WITH WIRE ROPE 



[29] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

would be a peril to navigation, but the cities of 
Cincinnati and Covington, facing each other 
across the river, cried for the bridge. The 
rvermen were on top in 1846 when Roebling 
came along, fresh from the building of the wire 
bridge in Pennsylvania and with his head full 
of wire bridges, and offered to throw a wire 
span across the Ohio with a length of 1057 feet 
and a floor height above the water of 103 feet. 
For just ten years the steamboat faction 
staved it off. It was not begun till 1856, just 
after the Niagara Bridge was opened. The 
panic of 1857 and then the Civil War kept the 
project at a standstill until 1863. On Easter 
Day in 1867 the bridge was opened. Colonel 
Washington A. Roebling, son of the pioneer, 
was the first to cross on its cable. In the mean- 
time John A. Roebling had completed not alone 
the Niagara Bridge, but the Alleghany Bridge 
over the Alleghany River at Pittsburg. The 
last named differed from the Niagara, Ohio and 
later East River bridges in that it had several 
piers in the streamway, after the manner of the 
old type structures, but in principle it conformed 
to the plan which had been in his mind from the 
beginning. His son, Washington, was his only 
assistant. 

[30] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

BRIDGING 
NIAGARA GORGE 

In all the world, perhaps, no place could have 
been found where the building of a simon pure 
"Suspension Bridge" would have been a more 
spectacular accomplishment than over Niagara 
Gorge, with the Falls thundering a little way 
upstream, and the waters lashing and fuming 
underneath; no place where its slender beauty 
could have had such stern and impressive back- 
ground. The idea of carrying railroad trains 
over that turmoil of waters on a web apparently 
so frail, evoked a storm of protest from well- 
nigh all the foremost engineers of the time. 
But Roebling was a practical man as well as a 
stubborn one. After all, he was dealing with 
rock and wire and he knew what they would do. 
He built the bridge, the first of its kind to carry 
railroad traffic. All the world of that day knew, 
but most of it now has forgotten, how he flew 
a kite across the gorge to get his first wire over, 
and from that built up his cables. On March 
16, 1855, the first train passed over it. With 
one remodeling it continued to carry increas- 
ingly heavy loads until nearly half a century 
later it was replaced by a larger structure, 
better calculated to bear the burden of modern 
equipment. 

[31] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

THE "SUSPENSION BRIDGE" 
PROVES ITSELF 

"Suspension Bridge" not alone proved itself 
in point of service, but it demonstrated the 
soundness of Mr. Roebling's claims for the wire 
structure. The Ohio structure, which followed, 
outdid Suspension Bridges in length of span; in 
economy of material, in simplicity and charm 
of outline it clearly foreshadowed the still 
greater work, the designing of which was to be 
the crowning accomplishment of his life. He 
was working with a practiced hand now. The 
doubts, if he ever had any, were behind him. 
Behind him, also, was a producing plant tuned 
to turn out at speed the materials he needed, 
with certainty of their quality. 

He had proved that the making of big bridges 
with wire was feasible, and that it was simple, 
as most great things are after they have been 
done. There were only three basic parts to a 
suspension bridge after all — towers, cables and 
anchorage. Suspending the roadway, which to 
the average man seems the vital part of the 
creation, is, from the engineering standpoint, 
only an accessory work. John A. Roebling had 
concentrated his life's effort, not on mere 
methods of commercial production, but rather 
on the proving of his contentions. He needed the 

[32] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

right kind of wire rope to prove them, so Hke a 
wise man he made it himself. 



He came to the summit of his achievement 
with the acceptance of his plans for the build- 
ing of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, his faith 
vindicated, his theory, which he had fought so 
hard to sustain, endorsed by boards of noted 
engineers and acclaimed by the public, starting 
out on the realization of his long dream— the 
building of the Eighth Wonder of the World, 
a comparatively slight accident, the bungled 
docking of a ferryboat, which crushed his foot 
and brought on tetanus, put out the steady 
candle of his life. 

It was the very whimsy of fate. His work 
was done. He had created, out of imagination 
and energy, the finished designs for a wonder 
fabric, ready for the labor of an intenser age. 
He did not live to see the spider structures hung 
like wisps of gossamer above the restless water- 
ways of New York, but his name is woven into 
the very steel of them. 



33 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 



CHAPTER III 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE 

Early in the fifties, when the Niagara ac- 
complishment was more or less the talk of two 
continents and communication under seas by 
cable had helped to emphasize the possibilities 
of wire, John A. Roebling, protagonist of the wire 
bridge idea, advanced a proposal to connect 
New York and Long Island by a suspension 
bridge and release the people of Brooklyn from 
a segregation which they had made a somewhat 
futile pretense of enjoying. Habit dies hard. 
The crust of custom becomes strangely indurated 
with long exposure, and Brooklyn residents had 
fought the East River in profitable, if archaic, 
ferryboats too long to be lured lightly into any 
liaison with iconoclastic Manhattan by way of 
a wire bridge. 

Roebling waited another decade, but he 
hustled while he waited. The Brooklynites 
continued to make their uncertain ways across 
the river in times of storm and tide and ice as 
the Lord gave them strength, and the sacred 
ferryboats still paid dividends. The vicious 

[34] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

winter of 1866-7, coldest, bitterest, longest the 
cities have ever known, wrung forth at last a 
cry for relief. They could wrap themselves up 
against the weather, but no weight of woolens 
could turn the shafts of ridicule. It was grand 
ammunition for the advocates of the bridge, 
when people traveling by train from Albany 
actually reached New York sooner than did 
the man who did business in New York, and left 
his domicilium in Brooklyn at the same hour. 
And besides, the Roebling cap had another 
feather in it now, in the completion of the Ohio 
Bridge. He was building wire bridges every- 
where, and it began to look as though there 
was some body of truth in the Western con- 
tention that New York was the most pro- 
vincial city in America, for all its self-approval. 

At one of the many hearings that were held 
on the bridge question a famous engineer who 
favored the wire type was asked what reason 
he had for believing it would do the work. 

"I believe it," he replied, "because Roebling 
says so." 

THE INITIAL CHARTER 
GRANTED 

The demand for the bridge rose to a clamor. 
In the month of May, 1867, the initial charter 

[35] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

was granted, and Mr. Roebling was appointed 
engineer. Three months afterward he sub- 
mitted his report and estimates, which were 
examined and approved by a commission of 
engineers from the United States War Depart- 
ment. Then he set about preparation for the 
task. 

THE DEATH OF 
JOHN A. ROEBLING 

It was while fixing the location for the 
Brooklyn tower that he met with the accident 
that caused his death. But his work had been 
well done, and his son and associate. Col. Wash- 
ington A. Roebling, took up without delay the 
execution of the plan he had helped to create. 

If the older Roebling encountered obstacles 
in bringing his great idea to the point of accept- 
ance, the pathway of his successor, called with- 
out warning to take over responsibility for the 
greatest engineering labor of the age, was not 
strewn with roses. 

THE WORK OF CONSTRUCTION 
BEGINS 

It was in the summer of 1869 that John A. 
Roebling died. The second day of January, 
1870, saw the actual work of construction be- 
gun, when laborers started to clear away to 

[36] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 




WIRE ROPE IN THE QUARRY 



[37] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

prepare for the foundations of the Brooklyn 
tower. From that day forward, through a 
baker's dozen of years, there was no rest, 
though there was plenty of interruption. Until 
the job was ended Washington A. Roebling 
simply lived the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a 
colossal job, punctuated with changes and prob- 
lems and complications, but it went forward. 
The landmarks of a bygone age, old houses of his- 
toric memory on the water fronts of both cities, 
vanished silently and where they had been, by 
and by there grew piles of masonry to form the 
approaches. From the huge caissons over 
against either shore rose the towers, tall and 
grim, which were to carry- the cables. In due 
time they stood complete, with their broad 
bases welded to the rock by an ingenious bond 
of stone and concrete in the river's bed, and 
their crests nearly three hundred feet above the 
top of the tide. A hundred and nineteen feet 
— and three inches, to be precise— above the 
water opened the two tall arches in each tower, 
stretching upward one hundred and seventeen 
feet in air. It was through these the bridge 
proper was to pass, with its gangways for horse 
and foot and railway traffic. 

[38] 



Out SPINNING THE Spider 

COULD THOSE SLENDER TOWERS 
CARRY THE GREAT LOAD? 

The hurrying people of New York and Brook- 
lyn watched the thing grow and wondered fear- 
fully whether the slender towers would stand 
the strain. In Harper's Magazine for May, 
1883, now itself yellowed by age, is an exhaus- 
tive article concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, in 
which one is told at length and with an en- 
gineer's exactness, the steps by which the 
achievement was brought, after thirteen labor- 
ious years, to proud completion. 

Even to the curious layman the details are 
no longer of insistent interest. One thing is 
emphasized, however, which well as we know 
it now can never cease to hold the mind in a 
certain wonder — that all the weight and solid- 
ity and massiveness are in the towers, the 
foundations and the long expanses of stone 
work, which stretching inland nearly a thousand 
feet, serve to guard and strengthen the anchor- 
age for the cables which are the working force. 
The rest is wire, for the most part; wire, slender 
by contrast and against the background of the 
sky, but endowed with great strength by care 
and skill in fabrication. John A. Roebling and 
his son had staked their name and their future on 
the strength and quality of Roebling wire. 

[39] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

In that long ago story of the Brooklyn 
Bridge, there is written the lesson that clear 
thinking and courage and perseverance can 
accomplish the seemingly impossible. What 
traveler over those high-hung roadways ever 
stops to ask himself how those great round 
cables, stretched in long, inverted arches above 
the surge of the river traffic, were ever put in 
place? They are today simply a part of the 
stage setting of a busy life, like the river itself. 

HOW THE GREAT CABLES 
WERE MADE 

Each of these cables consists of nineteen 
strands of about two hundred and seventy-eight 
No. 8 B. W. G. wires each, and each wire is 
continuous in its strand, like the yarns in a skein, 
traveling eternally to Brooklyn and back, up 
over the top of one tower, down in a long curve 
above the tideway, up to the other tower and 
down again, to be gripped and carried by links, 
like a chain, down to the everlasting clutch 
of the rock and concrete-bound anchorage. 
Each skein is a million feet long — nearly two 
hundred miles — and still men talk of "Oriental 
patience." 

There is no twist in these ponderous cables, 
as there is in a wire rope. Every reach of wire 

[40] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

lies flat and separate, and when all were in 
place they were laboriously bound together, 
first the strands, then when all the strands were 
up, the whole fabric, into cylindrical form. 
There are other strange things about these 
cables; one is that they make practically no 
strain on the towers save to sustain their 
weight. Another is that the long storm cables 
that radiate downward from the top of the 
towers to the bridge floor, for a space of four 
hundred feet inside and outside each tower, are 
themselves calculated to sustain, if need be, 
the imposed weight for that distance. So that 
the margin of safety in this seeming web-like 
structure is far in excess of what timid imagina- 
tions have pictured. That was a cardinal 
feature in all John A. Roebling's plans. He left 
a safety margin many times greater than the 
load. It has been an open secret for years that 
the Brooklyn Bridge has been unwisely taxed, 
but he knew it would be. 

STRINGING THE CABLES 
ACROSS THE EAST RIVER 

Before the cables were in place, New York 
and Brooklyn stared up at the river-wide 
space between the bare towers and wondered 
by what wizardry a bridge could ever be swung 

141] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

across it. The beginning was simple — as 
simple and prosaic in a way as the hitching of 
a horse — in principle. It began with wire rope. 
A scow with a coil of three-quarter inch rope was 
moored alongside the Brooklyn tower, and the 
end of the coil was hoisted up the face of the 
masonwork, passed down on the land side and 
then carried back. 

Next, suspending the river traffic for the 
necessary time, the scow was towed across the 
river, paying out as she went, and the rope 
carried over the New York tower, then wound 
on a huge drum till it hung high above the river 
and clear of the tallest topgallant. A second 
rope was run in the same manner and the two 
were joined around huge driving wheels or 
pulleys at each end. An endless belt or 
"traveler," revolving by steam power, now 
stretched from city to city, and on a day in 
August, that lives yet in the memory of every 
man who was there, E. F. Farrington, the 
master mechanic of the project, who was a 
veteran of Niagara and the Ohio Bridge, set 
out to show the workmen, who on this slender 
aerial were to begin the long labor of hanging 
the cable, that it was easy if you only thought 
so. In a "bosun's chair" he shot out from the 

[42] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 




HELPING TO RELIEVE THE FREIGHT CAR 
SHORTAGE BY QUICK LOADING 



143] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

top of the Brooklyn tower, down the long sag 
in the traveler and up to the New York side, 
while a million people craned their necks from 
the streets and docks and housetops and boats 
along the river, and swallowed hard at their 
hearts. 

The bands played, the cannon tore the air, 
the multitudes yelled themselves hoarse, the 
steam whistles of the harbor shrieked to the 
sky the tidings that, though nobody then under- 
stood it, "Greater New York" was on the way. 



This was six years and a half from the time 
when Washington A. Roebling had begun the work 
of construction. Seven other years followed, 
years full of troubled effort, of planning and 
replanning and replanning, of battling with the 
twin devils of Contraction and Expansion. 
The tensions all had to be secured in absolutely 
uniform weather. A determination made when 
the sun was shining on one part of the bridge 
and not on another might have thrown the 
whole calculation awry. Sun and wind played 
pranks with the work in the summer and in the 
winter snow and ice coated the wires and run- 
ning gear so that work was often impossible. 

[44] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

Deflection varied a third of an inch for every 
degree of temperature. 

"In short," says the writer of that time, "the 
ponderous thing, while neither small nor agile, 
has a trick in common with the minute and 
lively insect which when you put your finger 
on him isn't there." 

THE FABRIC GROWS 
TOWARD COMPLETION 

But in due time the great cables were in place, 
and bound. Then the suspender bands were 
set, from which suspender cables hung to hold 
the frame of the roadway. And so the fabric 
grew toward completion, hung practically in 
two sections, which all the world nowadays 
doesn't know, with an expansion joint connect- 
ing them in the middle to absorb the expansion 
and contraction of the metal. Even the rails 
at this section are split in half lengthwise, to 
permit them to slide back and forth with the 
changes in temperature. 

There were accidents and drawbacks and 
political complications, as there are always bound 
to be in public works; there were believer and 
unbeliever, booster and knocker, as now, but 
the work went on to its completion and in 1883 
the day of realization came. Wire was king. 

[45] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

Doubters and malcontents murmured for a 
time, but little by little subsided. The opening 
of the bridge was one of those memorable days 
of which New York has had so many in her 
brief history, a day when President and Governor 
and many lesser dignitaries, who have now 
passed from the stage, strutted their little hour 
to hail the passing of a milestone, and there 
were "fireworks in the evening." 

THE BEGINNING OF 
A NEW ERA 

A new era had now definitely begun. There 
was a recognized agent in the world strong 
enough, with engineering guidance, to shoulder 
its most staggering burdens, and the name of 
Roebling began to weave itself in letters of 
wire through the whole web of modern industry. 
Thirty-seven years have come and gone since 
the Brooklyn Bridge was finished and thrown 
open to the swarming people. Even when they 
saw they wouldn't believe it; many of them 
mounted to its span with their hearts in their 
mouths. There had been a world of carping 
and prophecy of disaster. A public that 
clutched at novelty as an addict does for stimu- 
lant could not assimilate the idea that there 
could be safety in wire where such enormous 

[46] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

weight was laid upon it. Its frailty of appear- 
ance fooled them. For years after the Bridge 
had taken up its load and was carrying without 
protest or misbehavior the traffic of two cities, 
there came periodical alarms regarding the 
discovery of strange faults in construction, or 
disintegration of the wires caused by vibration. 
It was the one dependable theme for the alarmist 
and sensational writer. 

But the proof was in the using. The slender 
span has stood the test of time and tide and 
wind and wear, and stood them all so well that 
it has fixed for a century at least the type of the 
super-bridge. 

TWO MORE BRIDGES 
TO BROOKLYN 

Wire bridges have become a familiar thing 
in the lives of cities. Two more have come to 
give the crowding population of New York 
freeway over the East River, as the city's life 
has spread northward. For the Williamsburg 
the Roebling firm furnished the wire and in- 
stalled the cables. In the Manhattan Bridge 
it had no part save the making of the wire, not 
a trivial task, since in the cables alone there are 
12,000,000 pounds. 

[47] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

These bridges are bigger than the Brooklyn 
Bridge with which the troublesome river was 
first overcome, but it will be many a day before 
the glamour that surrounded the earlier creation 
will have worn away, or people the world over 
cease to speak of it with wonder and a certain 
measure of awe. Anybody, perhaps, can build 
a wire bridge now; perhaps, too, somebody 
some day can build one with more of simple 
grace and slender beauty, but it is certain 
nobody ever has. 



1481 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 



CHAPTER IV 
WHERE WIRE IS MADE 

To measure the growth of wire, with its many 
forms and composites, during the last forty 
years would be to trace in detail not alone the 
progress of science, invention and mechanical 
industry, but the myriad conceits that have 
come ostensibly to facilitate the process of 
living. In the search for new comforts, for 
means of avoiding physical exertion, the world 
has been littered with novelties, and most of 
them depend on wire. Personal life as well as 
commerce and industry is interlaced with wire. 
With the opening of new countries, the increase 
of populations, the flocking of outland people 
to the cities and the consequent lack of farm 
labor, ingenuity has been more heavily taxed 
to find the quick and easy way of doing the 
world's work and keeping food in its mouths. 
Wire, so adaptable to the heaviest as well as 
the lightest tasks, has labored from year to year 
under an increasing demand. 

It is not surprising therefore that a company 
which in such an impressive way had fixed 

[49] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

itself in recognition as the first exponent of 
wire's usefulness should have grown in this 
period from modest commercial stature to a 
high place in its field and to the enjoyment of 
large production. 

THE GROWTH OF THE 
ROEBLING BUSINESS 

When the sons of John A. Roebling took up 
control of the business he had established, 
about one hundred men were employed and 
the product of their industry approximated 
$250,000 annually. Just before the beginning 
of the war more than eight thousand employes 
were engaged in the manufacture of Roebling 
products and the value of the output ran far 
into the millions. The factory which was so 
meagre and so humble in 1848 has spread its 
buildings not only over the surrounding acres, 
but across what were then neighboring farm 
lands until, constrained not alone by the pyra- 
miding demand for its products but by the 
soaring values of the city that had grown up 
around it, and of which it had been in some 
measure the creator, it went pioneering again, 
sixteen years ago, down the Delaware, and 
established a new nucleus, which will suffice 
for a long period to come. 

[50] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

With the erection of the cables for the 
Williamsburg Bridge, the Roebling firm with- 
drew from the competitive field of engineering 
contracts and concentrated all its energies in 
the perfection of its product — wire. 

In view of the more distinctly industrial char- 
acter of the Roebling enterprise under the later 
dispensation, it is of interest that the varied 
activities of John A. Roebling, as a scientist, a 
master of materials and a peculiarly astute 
mind in affairs, have been carried on severally 
among his sons and grandsons. Colonel Wash- 
ington A. Roebling, the president of the com- 
pany, who executed the plans for the Brooklyn 
Bridge, is an engineer of well-known ability. 
His intimate contact with all the affairs of the 
company during such a long period of develop- 
ment, his kindly and generous support to con- 
structive achievements, has been a source of 
pride and invaluable assistance to the younger 
generation of the Roebling fraternity. His two 
brothers, Charles and Ferdinand, now dead, were 
both intensely active during their lives. Charles 
G. Roebling' s talents as a builder of plants and 
machinery and an unusual gift of turning out a 
product of the highest excellence, were, in a large 
measure, the cornerstone for the tremendous 

[511 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

success of the Roebling Company. It was 
during the period of his direction that the manu- 
facturing capacity grew so rapidly. 

The simultaneous expansion of the commercial 
field was the life work of the other brother, 
Ferdinand W. Roebling, who carried the 
Roebling products to all corners of the globe. 
A clear and far vision, an uncanny ability to go 
straight to the point and a keen knowledge of 
human nature, were a few of the strong traits of 
his mentality. Under his control of financial 
and ethical matters the John A. Roebling's Sons 
Company established a worldwide and enviable 
reputation for stability and fair dealing. 

Ferdinand, although an indulgent father, 
brought up his two sons, Karl and Ferdinand, Jr., 
in the old-fashioned way. They were taught 
from early boyhood that theirs would be no 
bed of roses, that manhood was an estate where 
responsibility must be accepted and assumed, 
and with this teaching ringing in their ears the 
mantle of the presidency of the company fell 
upon Karl G. Roebling, and the secretaryship and 
treasurership upon the shoulders of Ferdinand W. 
Roebling, Jr. 

Both sons upon leaving college were given a 
rigid training in all branches of the business and 

[52] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




TOWING WITH WIRE ROPE HAWSER 



153] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

early in their careers exhibited the executive 
ability and keen business foresight which their 
father had in so large a measure developed. 
Karl's talents lay principally in the gift he had 
of drawing from his associates their whole- 
hearted fidelity and devotion to the cause of the 
Roebling prestige. His death at the early age of 
forty-eight was a shock to the industry, and a 
great personal loss to those associated with him in 
the conduct of the business. 

While all of the Roeblings have possessed, in a 
great degree, the qualities of leadership, yet 
they have always recognized the necessity of 
surrounding themselves with a strong organiza- 
tion capable of carrying on this great industry 
after they had ceased their earthly activities. 

It was particularly under the regime of Karl 
Roebling that the strong foundation was laid 
for the present powerful organization — each 
department highly specialized and in charge of 
experienced well-trained heads, ably aided by a 
corps of competent assistants, all functioning 
smoothly like a well-balanced machine. Karl 
left this as his heritage to the business. He 
never did things by halves. His working day 
was long and intense, but to one so constituted 
it could not be otherwise. During the world 

[54] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

war and its aftermath the added responsibiUties 
he so cheerfully assumed, contributed largely 
toward bringing to an end a life full of early 
accomplishments. 

Ferdinand W. Roebling, Jr., the remaining 
son, now vice-president and treasurer, is an able 
engineer. His early training with the company 
was entirely in the manufacturing and engineer- 
ing side of the business. In more recent years, 
however, he has devoted his attention to its finan- 
cial affairs. His close contact with his father and 
brother, his thorough knowledge of the com- 
pany's policies, have well fitted him to sustain the 
Roebling name and all it represents in the 
business world. 

THE TRENTON PLANT 

The main or first plant of the company 
centers around the site of the original buildings. 
Its structures, yards and tracks cover more 
than thirty-five acres of ground about a mile 
from the center of the city. The Delaware 
and Raritan Canal and the Trenton Division 
of the Pennsylvania Railroad pass along its 
western boundary and directly before the door 
of the offices. The office building was erected 
in 1857 by John A. Roebling as a residence 

[55] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

and later, as manufacture crowded in around, 
it was given over to business uses. The spur 
tracks of the Pennsylvania traverse the company 
enclosure. 

Nearest to the ofTice building are some of the 
structures that Mr. Roebling built in the first 
periods of business expansion, among them the 
old rope shop, where by methods of his own 
devising he strove to meet the growing demands 
for rope. Some of the machinery he built is 
still in service in production of standard lines, 
showing how swiftly and how far, from crude 
beginnings, his active mind advanced along the 
road to better production, and how efficient 
management can prolong the life of a mechan- 
ism that is honestly built in the beginning. 

THE BUCKTHORN AND 
KINKORA PLANTS 

The second or Buckthorn plant lies half a 
mile farther to the south, also facing the rail- 
road and the canal. 

The third, which was christened Kinkora, 
after a neighboring village on the railroad, but 
is now Roebling, with a station of its own, is 
ten miles farther down the Delaware. All told, 
there are probably a hundred buildings in the 

[56] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

three plants, many of them of immense size and 
manufacturing capacity. 

From the wide diversity of its products, the 
men in the RoebUng estabUshment have come 
to refer to it as a department store. The prob- 
lem therefore of distributing its operations and 
keeping track of its large volume of moving 
stock and its equipment is a substantial one. 
While in some lines there is activity parti- 
tioned among all three plants, in the main the 
various divisions of labor are well concentrated. 
For the most part the Upper Works, though a 
considerable quantity of wire is made there, is 
devoted to what is termed "finished product." 
In the same manner the Buckthorn plant, 
while turning out some rope in small sizes, 
specializes in all forms of insulation and the 
manufacture of lead-cased cables. 

THE KINKORA PLANT 
AT ROEBLING 

The Kinkora or Roebling establishment, 
carrying the production of the subsidiary New 
Jersey Wire Cloth Company, making wire net- 
ting, window screens and other forms of wire 
cloth, is given over most largely to the making of 
steel wire and the fundamental work of wire and 

[57] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

steel production. With the company's large 
acreage at this location, its townsite and the 
facility of river transportation as well as rail, with 
unlimited water, of which this plant uses more 
than is pumped by the city of Trenton itself, 
the situation offers large opportunity for ex- 
pansion and profitable centralization of opera- 
tion. At the present time, while shipments of 
wire are made direct from Roebling to manu- 
facturers who use it in production of their 
own commodities, by far the greater part of 
the output goes to the other plants to be fin- 
ished into rope and specialties. 

Inside the tall palings that enclose the great 
mill buildings at Roebling, there is an open 
space, broad and long as a drill ground, threaded 
by spur tracks and heaped endlessly with stacks 
of pig iron and steel-making materials. It 
seems as though some giant had dumped there 
the salvage of a hundred battlefields. It lies 
there sadly rusting under the weather, waiting 
the moment when the mills shall stretch forth 
hands and hurry it in, rush it like a neophyte 
through the fierce initiation of heat and chem- 
istry, and having changed the very fibre of it 
by strange processes, send it singing forth, 
shining in great coils, twisted into cords and 

[58] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




MAKING A CROSSING BY CABLEWAY 
[59] 



Outs PINNING the Spider 

cables small and great, bare or insulated, 
bronzed or coppered, galvanized or enameled, 
huge and bulky or spun to hairlike tenuousness, 
to do its work in a busy world. 

MAKING 
WIRE STEEL 

Of course, the making of steel is no new 
story, but this is wire steel — the high carbon, 
the tough, the sinewy, the resilient, that must 
carry in itself as it moves along through these 
interminable buildings the analytically meas- 
ured proportions of this or that, which fit it to 
bear up the traffic of a giant bridge or convey 
a whisper of telephonic sound or register split 
seconds in an Elgin timepiece. It is "pig," 
and ore and "scrap," but just what kind and 
just how much of "scrap" and ore and "pig," 
these are subtle questions. It costs a lot of 
time and money sometimes to answer them. 

When the thirty-five hundred and odd de- 
grees of heat in the long rows of open hearth 
furnaces have brought this stubborn mixture 
to bubbling and seething like a busy kettle of 
soup — a workman adding a little manganese 
or other ingredient to the broth now and then, 
grimy men with long handled steel dippers 
take out a few thimblefuls from time to time 

[60] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

and hurry the sample away to the chemist, 
who, Uke a chef, tests the quaUty and pre- 
scribes the seasoning. By and by it is run off, 
from an opening in the bottom of the furnace 
into a huge caldron they call a "ladle." A fifty- 
ton crane conveys it down the long, shadowy 
building, to halt above a group of tall moulds. 
A wizard up in the gloom under the roof moves 
it from mould to mould, a few inches at a time, 
while the liquid steel is drawn from the bottom 
into one after another. The moulds are left to 
cool. 

BLOOMS 

Its history is now begun. It is an ingot — 
many ingots — and when removed from the 
mould is loaded on steel cars and borne away 
on its journey. When in due course the ingot 
comes to the "blooming mill" it is fourteen 
inches thick each way and five feet long. Heated 
again, it is marched up on a steel rollway, also 
controlled by a "man higher up," and into the 
hungry jaws of a machine that, after a series of 
swallowings, disgorges it at last, shrunken in 
sheer humility to a diameter of four inches and 
with a very long face — some forty-eight feet 
to be exact. And no wonder. In the process 
it has been kneaded into a dozen different 

[61] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

phases of flatness and squareness, and put in 
a way to profit by the everlasting squeezing 
and stretching it is to undergo. Now it is a 
bloom. 

BILLETS 

Again it is passed on, and from some sub- 
terranean blackness you see it rushed out and 
up to a sort of guillotine that first cuts off the 
flawy ends, where the impurities accumulated 
in its ingot state, and sends them to the "scrap'* 
heap, then lops the bloom as a man saws fire- 
wood, but a great deal faster, into billets vary- 
ing from one to four hundred pounds in weight. 
They are "billets" now, and at last are counted 
the raw material of wire, even after such an 
inferno of cooking. 

A steel loader gathers them up, carries them 
away in bunches and, by a trick of wire pulling, 
deposits them on other cars in rows as regular 
as the pickets on an old fashioned fence. 

THROUGH THE 
ROLLING MILL 

Along with the copper billets they are stacked 
in thousands and thousands of tons in the stock- 
yard outside the doors of the rolling mill, each 
in its group according to physical and chemical 

[62] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

character, waiting the next purgatory of change. 
One pile is marked for one mission, one for 
another, ranging through all the uses wire can 
be put to. These piles are forever vanishing, 
forever being replaced, as the wide world calls 
for wire. They disappear into the darkness of 
the mill and they are never billets again. 

Marshaled on cars and jammed by hy- 
draulic force into big reheating furnaces like 
a Brobdignagian bakery, fired with fuel gas, 
they come out glowing again and start on the 
next stage of reduction. The passage through 
the rolling mill is a short life and a merry one. 
If they were kneaded in the blooming mill it 
was a mild experience. Here they are mauled 
and manhandled and masticated by swift, con- 
tinuous and looping mills that are born with a 
huge appetite for the largest billets, and make 
rods of great length. Down they go, under the 
gripping of relentless fingers that squeeze them 
first square, then oval, then square again, and 
pass them on, always smaller, toward the 
journey's end. Sometimes it's half an inch, 
sometimes more, according to the needs of 
trade. 

[63] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

THE MILE A MINUTE 
JOURNEY INTO WIRE 

Wire goes the whole distance, whisking 
along through the murky, half dark mill, up 
and down at a mile a minute, like flaming 
serpents flirting fiery tails, as the men, 
armed with tongs, seize and whip them from 
one pair of rolls to another. In they go, around 
the grooved repeater and out again to be grabbed 
with a motion swift as the dash of a pickerel, 
and thrust once more into the next set of rolls. 
Always the lightning speed and always the long 
tail, red hot and smaller than before, and longer, 
playing "snap the whip" down the steel grooves 
to the bottom of the "pit," then straight away 
up the incline, a flash of fire in the darkness, 
and on from roll to roll. The men who handle 
these rods hold their ticklish posts only twenty 
or thirty minutes at a time. A straight eight 
hour day, if a man came through it alive, would 
send him to an asylum with a conviction that 
he was great grandson to Medusa. At the 
finishing pass where the man stands, a stream 
of four rods is going by him continually at light- 
ning speed, about a mile a minute; hundreds 
of tons in twenty-four hours looping the loops 
through the rolls and finishing in red coils of 

[64] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

quarter inch, lying innocent and rosy and round 
on the metal floor. 

To the novice they look like wire; to the 
cognoscenti they are only rods, and in order 
to be wire some day are hustled off to the clean- 
ing house and in bunches plunged into a bath 
of acid. This takes off the scale the rolling 
left on them. But acid in wire steel is like 
heresy in the church. It has to be purged away. 
This is done by immersion and then by a coating 
of lime to neutralize by chemical action whatever 
taint may remain. The steel is then baked from 
twenty-four to forty-eight hours to remove the 
hydrogen. 

Wire making has just begun. From this 
time on it is a wonder-work to the novice, a 
mechanical sleight of hand performance by 
which hundreds of shadowy men and other 
hundreds of whirling wheels spin the rod down 
ever smaller and smaller till what was once a 
stodgy four foot billet is perhaps a thousandth 
of an inch thick, fifteen odd thousand miles 
long, weighs less than a quarter of an ounce 
to the mile, and has to be looked for with your 
best reading glasses. It is just three times as 
fine as the hair on your head. 

[651 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

THE WORK OF 

THE WIRE DOCTORS 

Never think that the tall chimney of a manu- 
facturing plant tells the story of all that goes 
on in its shadow. It isn't all coarse work. If 
you could see the things that are done to a block 
of steel, and the brains that are mixed with it, in 
the Roebling plant, before it comes out and goes 
on its way, they would make you take off your 
hat to a piece of wire for the rest of your natural 
life. But it isn't all, what happens to the out- 
side. There are wire doctors who follow the 
changing symptoms of the metal through its 
many processes, with diagnostic eye as keen 
as any medico's for traces of typhoid or mumps. 
Through all the process there are reheatings 
and coolings, at carefully specified temperatures, 
to give temper and then to take it away, to 
keep the ductility without sacrificing endur- 
ance. It is one business where you simply have 
to eat the cake and keep it, too. 

There is wet drawn wire and dry drawn wire, 
and chemical reasons for drawing wire wet, and 
divers ways of drying wet wire to attain certain 
conditions; there is lubrication by means of dry 
materials as well as oil, and soap suds, funny 
things that also act on the material itself in 

[66] 



O U T S P I N N I NG THE SpIDER 




TRAMWAY RUNNING ON WIRE ROPE CABLE 
DUMPING COAL AT MINE 

(671 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

mysterious ways. But this is no text book. 
No thinkable effort is omitted that will help 
to make the wire material perfect in quality 
and service condition, but the proof of the 
pudding in the making of wire is in the Olsen 
machines — miraculous things that will smash a 
big wire rope or snap a hair of wire and register 
to a decimal the breaking strength of each. 
There are tests for tensile strength, for torsion 
to show how many twists a piece of wire will 
stand, and for bending. There are microscopic 
tests for molecular condition and men who will 
almost tell you from a microscopic section 
the maximum service of which the rope made 
from a given wire is capable. Any bundle of wire 
that doesn't pass the test for the job on hand 
is discarded and used for something else, and 
a record of it all is kept with scrupulous care. 
Any foot of wire that passes through the ship- 
ping room on the way to market has a clean 
bill of health, ample for the use to which it is 
destined, and the amount of material that is 
scrapped for faults, where work is on stringent 
specifications, would be sudden death to a 
business that hadn't a wide range of uses for 
product of whatever quality. Fortunately for 
the users of high-grade wire the market for the 

[68] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

lower grades is always hungry and crying for 
more. 

THE WONDER 
OF DUCTILITY 

There are complexities without end in the 
making and finishing of wire, but the real 
wonder of it lies after all in the initial principle 
which the German inventor in Bavaria gave 
to the world six hundred years ago — the simple 
but even now almost incredible fact that a rod 
of cold steel of the hardest quality — plow steel 
is the convincing name for it — can be seized 
by its sharpened end with a clamp they call a 
dog and drawn through a smaller hole, in a still 
harder piece of steel, three or four feet until it 
can be fastened to a drum, and then be wound 
off in miles almost without interruption. It is 
a wonder that grows as you watch it and yet 
it seems so simple. To see that steel, of tre- 
mendous strength and hardness, drawn through 
a tiny hole as if it were molasses candy — and 
yet it may have a tensile strength of two or 
three hundred thousand pounds to the square 
inch. 

There is nothing spectacular about the wire 
mill where this is done. On long benches the 
die-holding appliances are set up and the dies 

[69] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

set into them. The wire — or at first the rod — 
is run from a portable bobbin they call a swift, 
that stands on the floor, and the wire, after it 
has been given the hole, passes to a bobbin 
they call a block. Then it is taken on to a still 
smaller die and the same process repeated, with 
occasional reheatings, until it has the diameter 
of a thread. 

CUTTING 
THE DIES 

But by and by the time comes when the wire 

is so fine it cuts the steel of the die and loses 

its rotundity. Then a harder material is needed 

and the wire drawer goes the whole figure and 

uses a diamond. Cutting the steel dies is a 

cunning craft enough, but the expert, who, with 

a hair-like drill and a dab of diamond dust can 

penetrate a diamond with an opening that will 

be regular and measure to a thousandth of an 

inch, is a man who would think it no trick at 

all to pass a well fed camel through the needle's 

eye. 

* * * 

It would take a larger book than this to tell 
all the things that are done in the making of 
wire for various uses. In the main, the entire 
volume produced either goes to market as wire 

[701 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

of one sort and another, to be applied to its 
various objects or for sale, or else it is twisted 
into rope, of which the Roebling Company 
manufactures four hundred kinds, sizes and 
many qualities. The common fence wires are 
not among the Roebling specialties, but wire 
nettings are manufactured from a soft variety 
of basic steel which lends itself to the weaving 
process with almost the ease of animal and 
vegetable fibres. 

THE ENDLESS MANUFACTURES 
FROM "FLAT WIRE" 

The "flat wire," which has now attained 
immense volume of production, is, for the most 
part, rolled down from the round, in many 
qualities, and shipped as material to the makers 
of many things. There are wide, thin, beauti- 
ful ribbons which find their way to the shoe- 
string factories and are cut and clinched to the 
laces as tips. The list of novelties and parts 
that are made from various forms and widths 
of flat wire is as long as the list of Smiths in a 
New York directory. In the novelty shop, which 
does a million things, wires are cut and mechani- 
cally bent in hundreds of thousands of shapes, 
for clothes hangers, pail ear staples, daubers for 
bottles, meat skewers, hog rings, thread guards 

[71] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

for textile machinery, basket fasteners, shackles 
for car seals, saddlery parts, Welsbach mantles, 
clips and links for bedsprings, wiring for toys 
of all descriptions — and so on and on and on. 
And all this novelty business is a side line, like 
the square and triangular wires that are used 
by oil well drillers to keep the sand from getting 
into the oil. 

The special shapes of high quality wire that 
are made to order, to provide hard-wearing parts 
for typewriters and many other machines, are 
almost without number. 

SALVAGING 
"MILL ENDS" 

With the increasing cost of labor and materials 
effort has been made to salvage and make use 
of "mill ends" of wire, running sometimes to 
large quantity, which formerly were accounted 
waste. These are now passed through a 
straightening machine, which lays them out in 
uniform bundles of some ten feet in length, 
which again may be cut to shorter lengths for 
special purposes. In the buildings where this 
is done, at the Upper Plant, are piles of neat 
bundles of all shapes and sizes and grades, 
which once went to the scrap for reworking but 
now are utilized without additional cost. 

[72] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

COPPER WIRE 
AND COPPER ROPE 

Copper wire is manufactured by the Roebling 
mills in very large quantities and in many 
sizes and forms, principally for electrical use 
and for service where water corrosion shortens 
the life of steel. The little bond wires that 
link the rails of railways to perfect the carriage 
of current in the block signal system are mostly 
steel, but copper is used at stations and on 
sidings where the leakage from standing cars 
is apt to contain acids. Copper wire of all 
sizes down to the very fme is spooled and sold 
for use in arts and manufactures. For marine 
uses a deal of copper rope is made, and copper 
strand is twisted for lightning rods, the fix- 
tures and supports of which, in turn, are manu- 
factured from round and flat steel wire. The 
piles of this equipment, waiting shipment in 
the Roebling storerooms, give proof that the 
satire of the cartoonist and the mockery of the 
funny writer cannot destroy an ancient faith. 

The telephone and telegraph companies use 
uncountable miles of copper wire in line service 
and other miles in fine sizes for instrument 
coils and divers other functions. Electricity 
as an agent would be a halting cripple without 

[73] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

wire. The dynamo would have little more 
utility than a washtub. Armatures, frames for 
which are formed from flat steel wire, are wound 
in the Roebling plant in impressive number. 

One of the largest fields for copper is trolley 
wires, which are of great size and of many 
eccentric shapes. 

This is merely a glimpse at the utilities that 
go to make up the field for Roebling wire. It 
is doubtful if today the company owns a com- 
plete list of the wire it has made for special and 
even eccentric purposes, or knows within many 
thousands the things that are manufactured 
from its wire product after it leaves the ship- 
ping room. 

COATING 

AND FINISHING 

Use determines much in the finishing of wire, 
and of wire rope as well, as not alone concerning 
the chemistry of the inside, but the covering 
of the outside. Material that is made for 
service out of doors, under water or under 
ground, to ensure long life needs an exposed 
surface more resistant to moisture than the 
naked steel. Copper is proof, but the pure 
wire is expensive for most uses and where severe 
strains are incurred it lacks in strength. Modern 

[741 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

science has been too busy to recover the art of 
hardening copper which the ancient Egyptians 
lost. 

Zinc, in its best application, makes steel wire 
weatherproof for many years and the appar- 
ently simple process of galvanizing, the fixing 
of a coating of zinc on the steel has multiplied 
many fold the utility of steel wire in places 
where it could ill be spared. But there is gal- 
vanizing and "galvanizing." The first is worth 
the money it costs. 

There are other coated wires, too. The aero- 
plane strands and cords are tinned. There is a 
bronze enamel, and a copper coating which looks 
as if it were applied for protection but is really 
the incidental result of a dip in sulphate of 
copper, for other purposes in the course of 
fabrication. The coating of wires is chiefly done 
in the wire works of the Kinkora Mills, though a 
galvanizing house is maintained also at the 
Upper Works. For wire that is to be made into 
galvanized ropes and cords, the galvanic treat- 
ment is given before it goes to be made up. 

JOURNEYING THROUGH 
THE ROEBLING PLANTS 

For exercise, a journey through any one of 

[75] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

the Roebling plants, and especially the great 
Upper Works, is as good as thirty-six holes of 
golf. It is upstairs and downstairs, over an 
interminable number of thousands of square 
feet, through the mazes of a picture that is 
always changing its detail and its rate of speed, 
but which is all centered on one idea, to keep 
the stream of wire and wire rope, of all sizes, 
kinds and colors, moving toward the shipping 
room. It all seems so easy in its progress, so 
free from friction or any trace of confusion, 
that the layman does not stop to consider how 
many problems have bobbed up along the way 
of production, even of the most modest wires 
and rope. Wire is a trade involving intimate 
knowledge of many lines of business and manu- 
facture, since the character of wire required 
differs in nearly all. 

To the novice, wire is wire. Here he learns 
that what is wire for one thing is valueless for 
another and wire that looks to the unpracticed 
eye as if it were ready for market always has 
to undergo a few more processes before it is 
up to demands. Wherever, however far, you 
travel in this succession of high-roofed, airy 
buildings, you come always upon some new 
regiment of machines, some new container of 

[761 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




HOISTING FULLY COMPLETED LOCOMOTIVE 
WITH WIRE ROPE SLING 



77- 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

chemical or metal, with a long line of reels un- 
winding wire to undergo some additional treat- 
ment. And always moving among the build- 
ings are cars, big and little, packing wire or 
material from one place to another, to feed the 
wheels and furnaces. The tonnage from plant 
to plant and from house to house in the 
Roebling works would make a first-class annual 
business for many a modest railroad, even if 
it carried nothing else. 

INSULATION 

But when wire is finished it isn't always 
finished. Since electricity spread itself over the 
earth in a million services, insulation in various 
forms has come to be almost as important as 
the wire itself. Insulation in its more advanced 
forms is a complex affair, gauged to accord 
with specific conditions and multiplying pro- 
cesses to secure the maximum of protection, 
both from electric current to life and property 
and from dampness and abrasion to the wire 
itself. In the making of wire screens the wire 
men have taken a leaf from the cloth-mill book, 
but in weaving a casing of cotton or other 
fibre around the wire for insulation the process 
is strongly reminiscent of some of the New 
England textile mills. Long rows of machines, 

[78] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

black and silent and swift, reaching upward 
toward the ceiling, revolving rapidly on an 
upright shaft; long arms trailing downward, 
with wheels and bobbins like fingers plying 
dizzily but swiftly in and out around the wire 
which unwinds from its spool and keeps forever 
climbing. It is all like a Maypole, and the 
bobbins go in and out like children carrying 
each its ribbon. As the wire climbs, the whirling 
fingers braid around it a coating, tight fitting 
and impervious. Sometimes, where double in- 
sulation is required, there are two sets of arms, 
one above the other, the upper one putting on 
a second covering outside the first, of cotton 
of one color or another, or hemp or whatever 
else the experimentalists have found best for 
the purpose. You wonder how the bellcord in 
the railroad train can ever stand the pulling 
and jerking and wear and tear it gets. It is 
simple. It is just a perfectly made and highly 
tinned wire rope, with a double coat of braided 
cotton over it. The jacket may wear off in 
time, but the Roebling rope inside will never 
fail in a lifetime to get the message to the 
engineer. 

When these snug coverings are finished the 
wire for certain uses is taken to another part 

[79] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

of the works where it is unwound once more to 
pass through a bath of asphalt compound. 
After this process, which leaves a dull, dirty- 
looking surface, the spools of treated wire are 
put aside for drying, and then a final surfacing 
applied. The next journey is to the packing 
room. 

TELEPHONE CABLES 

Insulation is a wide range business. It cases 
wire in asbestos to prevent fire from stopping 
its work; but perhaps the highest phase is 
reached in the great cables of copper wires 
used in telephone service. For these the in- 
dividual wires are covered with paper of various 
colors, which serves not only for protection but 
enables men at the opposite ends of a long 
cable to pick out unerringly the wires with 
which connection is to be made. Colors are few 
but possible combinations are many. The 
machining of this is more than ever like the 
Maypole, with pink and blue and yellow strips 
of paper flashing in the shadows. When the wires, 
paper covered, are brought together in the 
cable, sometimes three or four hundred of them 
altogether, the whole goes through the taping 
machines, which apply one or two suits of what 
may be called "underwear," for after it has 

[80] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

been covered with two or three different 
materials there remains a suit of lead to be 
fitted, and this is a big work done deftly. 

Who has not seen men in the streets drag- 
ing huge pipes of lead through the open man- 
holes from big wooden spools? These are the 
cables you talk over. They have been papered 
and clothed — and tarred and feathered, maybe 
— and then encased in lead by a process 
that is so easy as to be laughable, and 
yet as ingenious as any one thing the wire 
miller does. Unrolling slowly from its spool, 
the heavy cable moves up to a machine built 
strong and four-legged from the floor. In the 
mid height of this, a few feet above the floor, 
is a square chamber containing molten lead. The 
cable passes in at the rear and upward. It 
requires some credulity to believe that it is the 
movement of the molten lead that carries the 
cable along, but in any case when it emerges 
from the "box," through an aperture that trims 
the soft metal down to uniformity, it has a solid 
lead covering as even as lead pipe, and at the 
point of egress cold water playing from just 
above cools it. Then it passes on through a 
long tank of water for final hardening and is 

(81] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

wound slowly, clean and shining, on the great 
spools that are to carry it to market. 

Many astonishing things are done in wire 
works, but done so swiftly, and smoothly and 
in such volume that they look easy. The man 
in the street, hurrying about his own business, 
never even takes time to wonder to himself 
how they are accomplished. 



:82] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

CHAPTER V 
WIRE ROPE— THE GIANT 

"Pig" and "ore" and melting materials, with 
a condiment of carbon, are the body and bones 
of steel wire. Their virtues, combined and in- 
tensified by tireless processes, and tested un- 
sparingly at every stage, are united in wire rope; 
and wire rope, when all is said and done, is the 
mighty backbone of the wire industry. 

Wire rope to the multitude is simply wire 
rope. But one rope is no more like another 
than Jones is like Brown or Smith like Robinson. 
Wire rope is a combination of twisted wires, 
just as men are bipeds. That is where the 
similarity ends. In outward appearance as well 
as inward character, habit, tendencies and be- 
havior in emergencies, wire ropes differ as 
widely as do people, and each has a meaning of 
its own. 

Each also is the fruit of long study and 
repeated test of the work it is to do not alone 
on machines and in the laboratory, but under 
actual conditions of operation. The wire rope 
engineer will tell you every rope has tempera- 

[83] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

ment. He spends his life knowing other people's 
business — rope business — and working out their 
rope problems. The answers to these problems 
are the four hundred different sizes and kinds of 
rope that the Roebling Company manufactures 
on its regular schedules. The rest are specials. 
Go where you will in the world nowadays, you 
will find wire rope doing the work. 

WIRE ROPE PROBLEMS AND 

THE ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT 

With the completion of the Williamsburg 
Bridge, the Roebling Company withdrew from 
competitive fields of contract engineering, but it 
maintains a large engineering department and is 
ceaselessly busy with construction and instal- 
lation problems from all over the world. In 
its files there is exhaustive record of every con- 
tract of magnitude, for construction, haulage, 
mine work, ship work — for any sort of work 
where rope is used and where the problems are 
difficult. Roebling engineers are always on the 
go, studying conditions where rope is to be 
used, to prescribe the fabric that will meet the 
need. 

There is, to begin with, a questionnaire of 
ninety-three questions, to be filled out by the 
master mechanic or engineer on any special 

[84] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 




THE AEROPLANE— A WIRE ROPE CREATION 



[85] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

work for which rope is to be recommended and 
manufactured. When these are answered the 
engineer is ready to begin work, which starts 
with the selection of materials and does not end 
till the man who is to use it has had specific 
instruction as to its peculiarities and care and 
protection. 

For this service the Roebling Company main- 
tains a large corps of specialized engineers 
busily engaged solving the problems of wire 
rope usage, and making suggestions to effect 
economies in wire rope operation. 

In fact, it doesn't end there. It is a saying 
in the Roebling establishment that a rope is 
never sold until it's worn out. 

THE "LAY" 
OF THE ROPE 

The cut ends of a diversified lot of wire ropes 
resemble, more than anything else, the eccentric 
forms of snow flakes, in their regularity and 
the grouping of their parts around a center. 
But there is nothing haphazard about the for- 
mations. Even the core is figured in the num- 
ber of days it will add to the rope's life under 
varying conditions. The wide difference in 
ropes consists not only in the materials em- 
ployed, which have much to do with their re- 

[86] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

sistance to divers strains and the manner of 
their use, but in skillful selection of sizes in the 
wire and arrangement in the strands of which 
they are composed; again in the distribution 
in the strands, the twists of the strands them- 
selves and the "lay" or manner in which these 
are twisted to make the rope. It is all the result 
of careful calculation. 

THE CORE 

A paramount factor too is the core, in secur- 
ing the maximum of wear. Its mission, in most 
ropes, is not to add strength, but pliability, 
and to serve as a cushion to absorb the impact 
which the strands make under the tension of 
service. The fibre cores, for this reason, are 
usually treated with some lubricant. In the 
majority of ropes hemp is used for a core but 
in those intended for stationary service the 
core may be of steel. This will add from seven 
to ten per cent to strength and very largely to 
rigidity. 

When we speak of wire rope most of us have 
a mental picture of a round fabric, but there 
are flat ropes as well, for use in mines or quar- 
ries where the haul is from great depths and 
twisting is to be avoided. These are made in 
all widths and thicknesses, and are constructed 

[87] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

by placing several strands together, side by side, 
and sewing them together with soft iron wire. 
But it is the round rope that supplies the great 
demand. 

THE STRAND 

In considering rope, one may start with the 
strand. Strands, as may be seen from the 
pictures of transverse sections of ropes, vary 
infinitely in character, but always with a pur- 
pose. They are made up in ordinary practice, 
of four, seven, twelve, nineteen or thirty-seven 
wires, according to the work the rope is meant 
to do. In the rope mills you come upon long, 
low "stranding machines," reaching down a 
long room and carrying in horizontal arrange- 
ment, wide apart but in circular formation, 
the wires that are to form the strand. At a 
point carefully determined with reference to 
the strain on each wire, in order to preserve 
uniformity, all these wires come together and 
pass through one opening in a twisting machine 
which whirls them into a unit. The finished 
strand is wound on bobbins. 

The direction of the twist, whether to right 
or left, is of moment in determining the char- 
acter of the finished product. 

[88] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

"STANDARD" OR 
GENERAL PURPOSE ROPE 

"Standard rope," so called, the general pur- 
pose rope, is composed of six wire strands and 
a hemp core, all being practically of the same 
size; but to secure particular results the number 
of strands may be four, five, eight, twelve or 
whatever may be desired. Already it will be 
apparent that there is wide latitude in rope 
making for the exercise of skill and the utili- 
zation of experimental record. This freedom 
in selection and adjustment extends through 
almost every process. For example, in the 
twists: when wires in the strands and strands 
in the rope are twisted in the same direction, 
which ordinarily they are not, the rope has 
what is known as a "Lang lay," after a rope 
man who devised the system. The twist, 
whether in strand or rope, has distinct effect in 
service. It may be long or short. If it is long 
the rope will be stronger and more rigid, if 
short, it will gain in flexibility. When it comes 
to the short twist rope, one sees the particular 
value of the twisting tests which were applied 
and recorded away back in the wire stage. 

[89] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

TESTING 
THE ROPE 

It is singular, but it is true, that the aggregate 
strength of all the wires that go to make up a 
rope cannot be retained in the rope, at least 
in the laboratory on the testing machines. 
When the rope is tested for breaking strength 
it is found that no sample will show more than 
ninety per cent of the total, and the average 
is about eighty-two. Part of this failure is due 
to the angle of wires in the strand, with a re- 
sultant stress on wires in excess of applied 
load; therefore, the greater the number of wires 
in the rope, the lower the efficiency. The 
other reason is that the contiguous strands in 
the rope nick each other under high tension, 
and so are weakened. This, however, may not 
be important in ordinary working loads under 
service conditions. These casual truths show 
with what multiplicity of tendencies the rope 
maker has to deal in devising a product to 
give service and safety in the often ticklish 
jobs it has to do, with great weights in hand, 
and human lives at stake. 

From molecular condition, as revealed by 
the microscope, down to the last petty detail 
in the plan of construction, there is never an 

[90] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 



'::^^^ 







THE STEAM SHOVEL SHOVELS BY 
MEANS OF A WIRE ROPE 



[91] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

end to the problems, and gravity has to be 
figured into the Ufetime of a rope as surely as 
the elusive trace of sulphuric and muriatic 
acid producing hydrogen occlusion. Wire rope 
is a business of exactitude and eternal vigilance. 
You have to deal with breaking strengths of 
from 40,000 to 340,000 pounds to the square 
inch of transverse section, but the wire that 
will lift weights at the rate of more than a 
hundred tons has entirely different charac- 
teristics than the lower strength material. And 
the why of that must be traced back to the 
treatment of the steel when it was passing 
through the wire stage. Rope makers dealt 
with molecules once and thought they were 
taking pains. They found they had to go back 
to atoms to handle their problems. Today the 
secret seems to lurk in the electron. 

FITTING THE ROPE 
TO ITS WORK 

Of the tricks in making ropes, there is no end. 
They are fitted for their work like a soldier or 
a gymnast, and built for it. A tiller rope must 
be flexible to the last degree, but it must be 
strong enough so it will stand up under the 
swift tensions of a storm or in the lightning 
manceuvers of a race. Therefore, like a few 

[921 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

ropes built for other purposes, the composite 
parts are not mere strands of wire, but little 
ropes in themselves, complete in all parts. And 
again, while ropes exposed to weather and 
stationary, like ships' standing riggings, are 
galvanized, those that are subjected to con- 
stant bending are not. For every variation, 
there's a reason. 

To the average man or woman, the elevators 
in tall buildings suggest danger. The rope en- 
gineer counts them highly safe because each 
elevator is equipped with a multiplicity of 
ropes and safety devices. What taxes his con- 
science and spurs him to the last possible effort, 
is the rope that goes to the "deep shaft" service, 
where the lives of men going up and down in 
five thousand feet or more of subterranean 
darkness, hang on the accuracy of his calculation. 

Only now, the Roebling engineers will tell 
you, is wire rope being perfected. Much of it 
is in what seem to be small details of construc- 
tion, which nevertheless go down into the basic 
principles that make for efficiency. Rope mak- 
ing has been treated as an exact science, because 
it dealt with materials that were more or less 
standardized. They are learning now that rope 
has a large unknown quantity that defies for- 

[93] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

mula past a certain point. For the lack of a 
better term, they call it "personality." The 
labor of today, and many years to come, is to 
identify these intangible factors and bring them 
where they can be computed to the end of 
securing greater endurance and safety. 

In the Roebling shops there are men working 
who got their jobs almost by heredity. Their 
fathers and grandfathers worked for John A. 
Roebling. 

"You ask them," said the Chief Engineer, 
"why they do a thing a certain way. They 
tell you simply that 'that's the way to do it." 
In the old days John A. Roebling figured out the 
way, and gave it to his workmen in the shape of 
orders — to-day somewhat different methods are 
utilized. To the cumulative experience of over 
eighty years of wire-rope making, the Roeblings 
have always availed themselves of the latest 
engineering skill. With up-to-date research, 
chemical and metallurgical laboratories, every 
progress in the art has been incorporated in their 
product. 

FOLLOWING THE ROPE 
AND ITS USES 

The Roebling people say that wire rope is 
their "baby." They give it the utmost of skill 
and care and caution in the making, and then 

[94] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

to see that these are not wasted, they follow 
it into the field, where it is to serve, with per- 
sonal attention to its installation and with the 
most detailed instruction for its protection and 
use, figuring out with nicety the speeds to be 
maintained, the size of the sheaves or drums 
around which it should travel to minimize the 
strain, prescribing its lubrication, providing 
printed warnings against all forms of misuse or 
neglect, with pictures to show the reason why, 
and other instructions and pictures to aid in 
detection of the first signs of trouble or 
exhaustion, and the reasons therefor. Study of 
the Roebling method, from the ore yard to the 
field of operation, makes clear the reason why 
Roebling rope, from the very beginning of the 
manufacture, has been accounted standard for 
quality. 

A Roebling catalogue is never complete. It 
cannot list and illustrate, without competing 
in size with the unabridged, more than a small 
part of the uses for which rope — and much of 
it special rope — is made, or the infinite number 
of attachments and accessories provided for 
installation and use on the job. 

[95] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

WIRE ROPE 
AND ITS WORK 

There is the transmission of power by means 
of a round, endless rope, running at high velocity 
over a series of sheaves or pulleys, carrying power 
to a distance of three miles; there is underground 
haulage, for which five distinct types of rope 
are used, enabling the engineer to make light 
of grades, even with staggering loads; logging, 
in which, in the primeval forests of the North- 
west, the horse or ox is a pigmy, and where the 
giant trunks, seven, eight or nine feet in diameter, 
are whisked up at the sides of mountains, 
hoisted into the air and deposited on cars, to 
be run down to the rivers on steep inclines, 
again operated by rope of great size and strength. 
There is quarrying, where rope is used in quan- 
tity for guying, and for hoisting the blocks of 
stone out of their beds, and then on aerial cable 
ways, to carry them on high over long distances 
to be loaded; there are the oil fields, in which 
just now, in the mad search for petroleum to 
supply the world's shortage, interminable miles 
of wire rope are being used, some of it an inch 
thick or over, to carry the drills, or for casing 
and sand lines. There is shipping — the battle- 
ship and the merchantman and the liner; the 

[96] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

yacht, the riverman and the tug — all strung 
with wire rope from stem to stern, and some of 
them from truck to keel as well — not to mention 
mooring lines which have their own plan and 
formula; there is towing, to which wire rope 
brought new possibilities and freedom from old 
troubles and old perils — witness the to^ying of 
the dry dock "Dewey" from Chesapeake Bay 
to the Philippines, thirteen thousand miles, on 
a pair of 1200 foot Roebling hawsers, which 
stuck to their jobs without interruption, through 
all sorts of weather, and lugged their burden 
into the harbor of Olongapo without a sign of 
weakness or exhaustion; there is dredging, for 
which wire rope has largely supplanted the old 
and cumbrous chain which was never any 
stronger than its weakest link. There is hardly 
an important harbor in the world today where 
these stout ropes are not busy clearing pathway 
and anchorage for marine commerce. 

MORE USES OF 
WIRE ROPE 

The list does not end. There are incline 
railways, in the mountains of East and West 
alike, as well as in foreign countries, which 
have made mountain climbing a primitive form 
of sport, and enabled one-legged men with per- 

[97] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

feet ease to get the view from towering peaks 
which otherwise would have been accessible 
only to the hardy mountain climber; there are 
cable railways with which engineers have been 
able to run cars out on an aerial roadbed of wire, 
over impassable gorges and morasses, to make 
fills for railway or other construction ; cableways, 
the forms and uses of which, in transferring 
materials, are without number; tramways and 
traction systems, which have now, save in par- 
ticular instances, given way to trolley, and the 
copper wire for this, again, comes in large 
and continuous tonnage from the Roebling 
mills; there is the perfect litter of hoisting 
slings, all over creation, for wherever men are 
doing work or business of any kind, there is a 
load to lift, and the wire rope, with its special 
appliances for quick hitch and release, is fast 
relegating the old time chain to the category 
of antiquities. In 1862^the first of elevator ropes 
was made. Today millions are in use. 
* * * 

It is a long story, and one variety of rope is 
never just like another, save for the general 
purpose product before referred to, which figures 
in the schedules as "Standard." But in the 
making of all the many hundred kinds, the pro- 

[98] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

cess, to outward appearance, is the same, and 
impressive in the simplicity to which it has been 
reduced. From the tiny specimen, made for 
some finical scientific experiment, to the three- 
inch monster that contains single wires nearly a 
quarter of an inch in diameter, and drags half a 
million pounds of ore, with the aid of powerful 
machinery, at the Spanish American Iron Com- 
pany's mines in Cuba, the general principle of 
manufacture and the mechanism used in the 
making are all alike. 

ROPE-MAKING 
MACHINES 

In the several rope mills of the Roebling 
works are a large number of machines, some of 
which, built by John A. Roebling in the early 
days of his rope making, are still turning out 
rope, and good rope. His first product was made 
by hand in the old "rope walk" way. Today 
the ground where he did it is covered with build- 
ings full of speeding machinery that has little 
rest — devices that stand in long rows, eating 
up the strand that unwinds from the whirling 
bobbins to feed it, and turning off steadily the 
completed rope, which passes to spools, large 
or small, in proportion to its weight and size. 

[99] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

Simply described, the rope machine pictures 
itself as a hollow column cylinder, strongly 
framed and braced steel from the base of which 
arms extend, like the lower branches of a spruce 
tree. At the ends of these the bobbins are 
rigged, carrying the strands which are to be 
twisted into rope. These are led from the bobbins 
in toward the center, and pass into the column, 
which carries also the core and which in its turn- 
ing twists the strands together. The complete 
rope passes out over a pulley on to the spools. 
Machines for the smaller sizes of rope are strung 
out in a long file. The larger ones require elbow 
room; each of those for the making of the largest 
rope has a room to itself and is installed on a 
foundation of steel and concrete. 

When the mechanism is at work it suggests 
somehow the solar rotations. The bobbins 
have a triple motion. On the ends of the arms 
to which they are attached they travel around 
the column, at a rate of speed which of course 
is determined by the '*lay" required, but they 
are unwinding as the strand pays out and also 
turn completely end for end, at predetermined 
intervals. In the more modern machines there 
are two set of arms or "branches" above the first, 
for the purpose of carrying a greater number 

flOO] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




HOISTING A HUGE NAVAL GUN 
WITH WIRE ROPE SLING 



101 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

of strands. In this type the arms carrying 
the bobbins are somewhat shorter, allowing for 
a great rate of speed. There is something 
mysterious in the sight of these flying reels of 
steel, or copper maybe, for many ropes of sub- 
stantial size are made of copper for marine use, 
whizzing round and round like indefatigable 
moths around a big steel candle, or a dervish 
round his own spinal column on a spot of ground 
the size of a dinner plate, and the rope, hard, 
shining, round, packed around its core of hemp 
or steel, noiselessly gathering all this strength 
and energy into itself for use in the days of need. 
When you see it on the spool at the side, shining 
with its coating of lubricant, ready for work 
and able to do it, it is a little hard to associate 
so respectable and dignified a fabric with the 
rusty heap of iron that lay in the Kinkora 
yard. 

SPECIAL 
CONSTRUCTION 

There are records in the Roebling offices that 
tell interesting tales of special constructions, 
and pictures of enormous spools of rope, thou- 
sands of feet, in big diameters, running from 
spool to spool and since one spool is an ample 
carload, from one flat car to another, when 

[102] 



OUTSPINNING THE S P I D E R 

loaded for shipment. Such were the huge 
street railway cables, made for Australia, for 
Kansas City, for Chicago and New York. 
There is an amusing story of the New York 
street railway engineer who insisted that the 
cable be made in one section, 33,000 feet in 
length, but who changed his mind about the 
beauty of it when he got the goods and saw the 
elephantine spools of packed metal caving in 
the manholes in the city streets on their way 
to the point of installation. A gigantic rope 
machine was built in the Roebling plant to 
twist this mammoth. 

The cars that carry these heavy cables were 
made specially for the purpose. An ordinary 
car would crumble under the load, but the 
machine and the cars are still in use, and busy. 

When cables for street railways were dis- 
carded in favor of trolley, wire rope men thought 
the day of doom had come, but the field for 
wire rope for other uses has widened so fast and 
so far, in a rapidly widening world, that the 
cable orders, big as they were, have never been 
missed. It furnishes a significant index of the 
growth in all industrial activity, for there is no 
new phase of development or manufacture or 
work of any kind in which wire rope, or wire 

[103] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

in some form or other, does not play an in- 
dispensable part. 

POWER IN THE 
ROEBLING PLANTS 

In the three Roebling plants there are four 
electric power stations, aggregating over 16,000 
horse-power, and more than 150 boilers with 
25,000 horse-power. The coal consumption on 
the three plants is approximately 1000 tons a 
day, and the fuel oil consumption about 
20,000,000 gallons per year. In the Kinkora 
plant at Roebling there are thirteen miles of 
standard gauge railroad track. 



1104] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

CHAPTER VI 
WORKING FOR UNCLE SAM 

Of the load that war laid on productive in- 
dustry, it is beyond question that wire, the 
country over, carried its share. In the retro- 
spect, every man and every organization tries 
consciously or unconsciously to figure out what 
part individual effort contributed to the big 
result. Fortunately, perhaps, the question of 
relative accomplishment and of everybody's 
share in the outcome is one of the things that 
can never be settled, but in the picture war has 
left on the memory of those who lived it, wire 
and wire rope can never be very far away. 

As wire pervades every industry of peace and 
every department of living, so in the headlong 
rush of war, whether by land or sea or in the 
air, it was the handy and dependable agent 
that made a thousand other things possible. 
Wire did its work not only up in the smoke and 
the agony of the western front, not only where 
the fleets battled against the lurking death, 
but along every line of plain toil by which the 
unhalting supply of materials, both for battle 

[105] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

and sustenance, was kept flowing to the point 
of need. 

When the big order for multiplication of out- 
put came, wire rope manufacturers were not told 
to make one thing and a lot of it, as so many 
industries were. The demands of war, on the 
contrary, added diversity to what was already 
one of the most diversified of products. Every- 
thing was special. Every day's new load was a 
brand new problem in manufacture and in con- 
struction as well — something that had not been 
produced before, or at very best a new adapta- 
tion which required special manufacture and new 
organization; this in a skilled industry, at a 
time when skilled labor of any kind was scarce. 

A STORY THAT WILL 
NEVER BE TOLD 

The story of this period will never be told 
in its entirety. The Army cannot tell it, nor 
the Navy. They never knew it. All they did 
was to call for the stuff and get it. The wire 
makers will never tell it because they are too 
busy supplying the demands of peace — the re- 
building of a wrecked world and the develop- 
ment of a new one. Already the picture, big 
and thrilling as it was, is growing dim, its detail 
disappearing in the hurry of industrial produc- 

[106] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

tion, the solving of new problems, the supplying 
of demand. They look back over the old re- 
quisitions and specifications of the feverish days 
of 1917 and 1918 and are surprised to see that 
dust has gathered on them already; they count 
the figures of overwhelming volume which are 
their "war history" and wonder how in the 
world they ever did it. 

THE DOUBLE BURDEN 
UPON WIRE'S BACK 

What doubled the burden on wire's back was 
that every existing industry for which it had 
been making rope was "essential." The wire 
men looked around to find what they could cut 
out. There was nothing. To maintain the 
supply of oil, of coal, of ores, of food, to keep all 
kinds of transportation in full swing, to see that 
elevators kept running so that activity should 
not cease — these and a thousand other things 
were all essential to unity of effort and increase 
of production. Altogether the saving was 
trivial. They all had to be supplied, most of 
them double, and the Allies had been piling in 
orders. On top of this burly task came our own 
Government's great and variegated and un- 
deniable demands for war supplies. 

[107] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

In the carrying of such a load the wire in- 
dustry was hampered by the fewness of its 
plants and their distribution over the States, 
some of them far from points of ocean ship- 
ment. It was plain when America entered the 
war that only the most thorough co-ordination 
and centralized control of operation could make 
success possible; only the most economical 
arrangement of forces and distribution of 
materials. 

The Iron and Steel Institute, at the request 
of the Government, formed a committee to 
manage the production and distribution of wire 
rope, and from the fifteenth of May, 1917, this 
committee had on its shoulders the making of 
wire necessary to keep the country's work going 
at full speed and to supply the needs for war, 
of whose extent or character nobody had any 
clear idea. Karl G. Roebling, of John A. 
Roebling's Sons Co., was made chairman of the 
committee. 

THE WAR— ONE LONG 
COMMITTEE MEETING 

Throughout the war, the Roebling ofTices in 
Trenton were headquarters for the entire busi- 
ness of wire rope supply. It was one long com- 
mittee meeting, with production going on at 

1108] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

utmost intensity all the time. Here came all 
the orders for wire rope from the several Govern- 
ment departments and the bureaus in those 
departments, each with its long array of speci- 
fications, all requiring shipment to divers points. 
Much of the work required also a great labor of 
cutting and attaching, and fittings by the 
hundreds of thousands, and all, without an 
exception that stands out in anybody's memory, 
wanted in the minimum of time. 

It is the proud record of that committee that 
when the fighting ended in November of 1918 
every order had been filled and delivery made on 
time. Industry has no story of accomplishment 
to tell that can be more creditable than this. 
The Roebling plants, near to the seaboard and 
equipped for specialization, were devoted almost 
wholly to the manufacture of war stuff, domestic 
industrial orders being transferred to inland 
factories. 

THE RECORD OF PRODUCTION 
FOR WAR PURPOSES 

The record of production, for war purposes 
alone, shows that the Roebling Company manu- 
factured a very large percentage of the whole, 
which ran to unconscionable millions of feet. 
During the war the productive capacity of the 

[1091 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

plant was increased as much as seventy-five 
per cent, and the list of the employed at times 
ran close to ten thousand men. The numerical 
increase in men did not equal the growth in 
output. Here as well as in almost every line of 
industry the war furnished a revelation of the 
capacity of men for work. New lines of pro- 
duction, requiring skill, developed in common 
laborers, the only kind that at times could be 
obtained, a facility in production that before 
the pressure of war came to discover it would 
have been thought impossible. 

In looking back over the war work it is plain 
that the service rendered by the company in 
manufacturing material for the Allies, prior to 
America's entrance into hostilities, was of large 
value in familiarizing it with forms of produc- 
tion afterward required for our own Army and 
Navy. Another thing which aided in meeting 
a vast demand was the unremitting attention 
which the company had given to the perfection 
of aircraft material, from the first successful 
flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 
1903. At that time study and experiment had 
been started in the Roebling factories looking 
to the production of aircraft wire and strand 
and cord for all the different parts involved, 

[110] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

which should combine the utmost strength with 
the minimum of weight, with special reference 
to the stresses peculiar to aviation work. 

When the hour of need came, Roebling air- 
craft products had reached a stage of perfection 
which saved a world of hurried experimenta- 
tion and development. It was a demonstra- 
tion in preparedness, although up to 1914 the 
work had been done solely to keep industrial 
pace with a new and important development of 
mechanical science. 

THE GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHMENTS 
THAT CALLED FOR WIRE AND ROPE 

It is a fairly long list of Government establish- 
ments that is shown on the Roebling records 
as calling for war supply of wire rope. It in- 
cludes, in the Navy Department, the Bureau 
of Steam Engineering, Bureau of Construction 
and Repair, Bureau of Ordnance, the Bureau 
of Yards and Docks and the Naval Aircraft 
Factory. 

In the War Department were the following: 
Office of the Chief of Ordnance, Depot Quarter- 
master, Chief Signal Officer, Chief of Engineers, 
the Army Transport Service, the Quarter- 
master General's Office, the Signal Corps, the 
Aircraft Production Bureau, United States En- 

[111] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

gineer's Office, General Engineer Depot, Bureau 
of Insular Affairs, Procurement Division, the 
Balloon Department of the Aircraft Production 
Board, and the Director General of Military 
Railways. 

Always there were the United States Shipping 
Board, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and 
the demands for these alone were a business. 
In addition to all this the Committee made 
allocation of orders for the Argentine Naval 
Commission, the British War Commission, the 
Imperial Munitions Board, the Italian Com- 
mission and the Belgian Government. 

It doesn't seem such a large roster, but it 
took a world of wire to go around it. A few 
figures out of the total allocations will suggest 
what the total demand was and the task that 
it involved. 

SOME OF THE 
BIG DEMANDS 

The first big call on the wire rope pro- 
ducers was for submarine nets to protect the 
fleet bases and harbors. There were supplied 
to the Navy, for this purpose, 2,820,520 feet of 
rope, and it was regular rope that was required 
in this service, for the German submarines had 
developed a way of slashing through the earlier 

[112] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 




CUP CHALLENGERS. DEFENDERS AND SAILING VESSELS 
OF ALL TYPES SECURE THEIR RIGGING WITH WIRE ROPE 



113] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

and lighter nets. For the new type the rope 
ranged from an inch and a half to three-quarters 
of an inch; but it wasn't merely a matter of 
shipping reels of rope. Almost all of it had to 
be cut into lengths and attachments made, for 
these barriers were designed in sections. This 
necessitated, for the Navy order, 153,000 fittings. 
The Army Ordnance Bureau used nearly a 
million feet of rope for nettings, which was 
shipped to various coast forts. The whole ' 
volume of wire rope for nettings was furnished 
within four months. 

Another interesting order was from the 
Quartermaster's Department, which called for 
6,852,500 feet of rope and the manufacture of 
300,000 pairs of traces, requiring 3,000,000 
splices. These are what are called thimble 
splices, and, while fitting one of them is ordi- 
narily half an hour's work, the Roebling plant, 
with a force chiefly of men who were utterly 
unskilled, was turning off ten thousand pairs 
of traces a day at the peak of production on 
this order. This harness, for artillery purposes, 
was on English designs, adopted after consider- 
able delay, but by means of which a horse, 
when shot down, could be eliminated from the 
gun team in half a minute. 

[114] 



OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

The Spruce Production Bureau took over 
8,000,000 feet of rope, the Emergency Fleet 
more than 12,000,000 and the Fuel Administra- 
tion drew on at the rate of 2,500 tons a month. 
And all the time the mines and mills and 
ordnance plants, locomotives, cranes and all 
other manufactures kept getting largely increased 
supplies of rope to carry on their own war- 
driven work. Altogether the orders come to a 
figure that is hard to visualize. 

84,000,000 FEET OF ROPE AND 
A HALF MILLION FITTINGS 

But the climax, the call that taxed the wire 
rope makers most heavily and kept the arc 
lights burning in the mills was for the 84,000,000 
and odd feet of rope and half million fittings 
which were required by the Naval Establish- 
ment for the North Sea Mine Barrage, which 
put a prompt and distinguished shackle on the 
German submarines. The fitting of this rope 
was a task of moment, calling as it did for de- 
livery of the rope in lengths and made up ready 
for attachment on the ingenious plan which the 
mine involved. It was all done with time to 
spare. 

The Adriatic Barrage, an even more ambitious 
project since it dealt with a depth of 3,000 in- 

[115] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

stead of 900 feet, was all ready to be laid when 
the Armistice was signed. This took over 
12,000,000 feet of rope. 

When the fighting stopped, there was a per- 
fectly good mine barrage in the North Sea 
that had to be taken up and put out of com- 
mission. This called for 616,000 feet more 
of rope, with fittings to make it of use. Every 
mine was cancelled without a mishap, and 
there are now more than eighty million feet 
of "A No. 1" wire rope reposing at the bottom 
of the North Sea. But it did its work, captur- 
ing no less than seventeen German submarines 
in the first week. 

AND MORE THAN WIRE 
ROPE WAS ASKED FOR 

The Roebling plant, for the time, was given 
over to the manufacture of war necessities, 
hence its problems of material were made easy 
by the Director of Steel Supply. But the 
Roebling output for war purposes did not end 
with wire rope. In May, 1918, the company 
was employing close to ten thousand men, and 
in addition to rope making they wiere busy 
with the manufacture of immense quantities of 
steel strand, strand for outpost cables, copper 
strand, telephone wire, copper wire and mis- 

[116] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDEK 

cellaneous wires of all descriptions, which were 
needed in the service at home and abroad. 

A material part of the war work was the 
manufacture of wire especially for the field 
telegraph and telephone systems of the Signal 
Corps in Europe, where the American Army 
communications were the admiration of 
Europeans. This material possessed certain 
peculiar characteristics, and while speed in its 
production was an essential yet it was necessary 
that every strand be perfect, for the fate of 
armies rested upon it. 

The manufacture of this wire involved a 
great deal of detail and intimate knowledge of 
all sorts of materials, for while copper is used 
for electrical transmission there is an exterior 
protection of other metals and materials, each 
of which has its peculiar manufacturing difTi- 
culties. 

THE COMPOSITE 

STEEL AND COPPER STRAND 

For example, the "Composite Steel and 
Copper Strand" wire used by the Army was 
made up as follows: There was a center wire 
of tinned copper with ten outside wires of 
tinned steel. This wire had a maximum weight 
of 75 pounds a mile with a maximum breaking 

[117] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

weight of 300 pounds. Other types of wire 
were silk wrapped, covered with a rubber com- 
pound or with a covering of cotton braid treated 
with a waterproofing compound. 

TO MEET THE SIGNAL 
CORPS' REQUIREMENTS 

Take one type of the thousands manufactured 
by the Roebhng Company and see what must 
be done to make the finished product for the 
Signal Corps. This process, which includes 
both the manufacture of steel wire for the outer 
protection and copper wire for transmission, 
may be divided into the following parts: 

All steel materials are analyzed and inspected. 
Acid open hearth steel is made in ingot form in 
special furnaces. The steel is classified, and 
the ingots are reheated and rolled into billets, 
which are cropped to eliminate all segregation. 
The steel billets are reheated and rolled into 
rods of about ^ inch diameter. The rods are 
then tempered for wire drawing. Then comes 
an inspection and testing for physical charac- 
teristics of the metal, and the rods are cleaned 
in acid, washed, lime coated and left to dry. 

These rods are then drawn cold through dies 
to intermediate sizes requiring a repetition of 
the tempering, inspecting and cleaning opera- 

[118] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

tions. There is another series of drawing and 
then the final one through the hardest and 
toughest dies obtainable to a diameter of i^ 
inch. At this diameter one foot of the original 
rod has been extended to about 350 feet. 

Then comes another inspection and test of 
the mechanical properties. The wire is next 
cleaned in alkaline and acid solutions to remove 
all trace of the lubricants used in the wire 
drawing, and the wire is subjected to a bath in 
pure hot tin. Finally there is a Government 
inspection and test. 

So much for the manufacture of steel wire. 
The copper first appears in bars, which are in- 
spected and tested for their metallic purity. 
The bars are heated and rolled into rods of 
about 3/g inch diameter. These rods are cleaned 
in acid baths to remove all scale, and the wire 
drawn with the necessary annealing and clean- 
ing until wire that is only .0285 of an inch in 
diameter is the result. 

The final drawing of this wire requires the 
use of diamond dies with the necessary equip- 
ment and great skill of the wire drawers in 
piercing these minute openings. The copper 
wire then is annealed free from all scale and 
discoloration, and the tin coat applied by means 

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of a liquid tin bath. Then the Government 
inspectors test the copper wire. 

Ten strands of the steel wire are twisted 
about the one copper wire, and the Government 
inspectors again make tests to see if the inner 
copper wire is intact and properly protected by 
steel wire. All grease is removed from the 
strand, and tussah silk wrapped over the whole. 
To this is applied a compound with 30 per cent 
rubber, which is later vulcanized. Then come 
inspections for mechanical injuries and electrical 
characteristics. The single conductors are 
braided, the braid waterproofed, polished, 
twined, inspected, reeled for shipment, in- 
spected by the Government agents, packed, 
inspected again by the Government agents and 
finally shipped. 

All this is done with a great deal of rapidity 
but with no less care, the skill obtained by the 
workmen only by years of experience and by 
the technical men only by years of study. It 
required a thorough knowledge of steel and of 
the materials entering into the manufacture 
of steel, such as ore, pig iron and fuel, as well 
as of the properties and tests and manufacture 
of copper, tin, rubber, cotton, and various 
lubricants. And in the more general use of 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

wire and wire rope, a thoroughly comprehensive 
knowledge of many other materials, all 
mechanical and electrical phenomena in fact, 
are essential. 



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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 



CHAPTER VII 

A CITY BUILT OUT OF HAND 

All up and down the Delaware, between 
Trenton and Philadelphia, the "quality folks" 
in olden times used to build stately homes, with 
broad acres at their backs and looking lordly, 
with their Grecian porticos, out from the high 
banks that command the stream. You may 
see some of them yet, faded and old and full of 
family history, most of which was not so im- 
portant as it seemed to the builders. In the 
little towns that you pass on the trolley and the 
Camden and Amboy road, there is a certain 
Eighteenth Century somnolence, and a dingy 
pride of priority. They sleep on, as if it were 
creditable not to be busy. Bordentown, a few 
minutes' ride from Trenton, sits complacent 
amid its memories of the Bonapartes. It is 
there you change for Roebling. 

ROEBLING, THE TOWN 
A STORY IN ITSELF 

Roebling — the town, not the plant — to which 
some attention has been given, is a story in 
itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the 

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quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. 
It is a rattler of the dry bones of tradition, and 
pretty nearly the last word in corporation 
communities. Roebling maintains no staff of 
highbrow sociologists to discuss the things capital 
should do in order to make labor's pathway 
broad and bright. There's a town superin- 
tendent to look after things and he earns his 
pay. 

BUILT TO MAKE 
WIRE AND ROPE 

The town of Roebling was built to help along 
the making of wire and the wire rope. Making 
good rope, it is a good town, without any fanci- 
ful notions about "welfare work." The Dela- 
ware, flowing by in its beauty, accounts for part 
of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware 
means plentiful water supply and river trans- 
portation. To the workmen in the big mills 
which lie just at the back of the town, and to 
their families, which grow phenomenally, it 
means bathing, boating, a cool breeze on stifling 
midsummer nights, and a panorama that never 
ceases to be lovely. 

In both the city plants, as business grew, 
building followed building. A compact and 
populous section had grown up at Trenton. 

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More buildings could not be crowded into the 
original ground space. More land was needed, 
and as usual in such cases, men with land to sell 
all along to the south of the Upper Works, saw 
the company's need and had a brain storm 
about what the footage was worth. 

The Roeblings tried a little farther down 
stream. But down stream didn't mean down 
price. So they made a clean job of it. Ten miles 
down the river was a little old station called 
Kinkora, where the real estate infection had not 
appeared. There was land well up above high 
water, and plenty of it. The Delaware was very 
cheap down there, as compared with Trenton 
city water rates, to a concern that used as much 
water as all the rest of the city put together. 

A LIKELY PLACE 
FOR A WIRE MILL 

It was a likely place for a wire mill, but if a 
dozen strangers had struck Kinkora on the 
same evening the town would have had trouble 
to find beds for them all. It meant twenty 
miles rail travel a day for the workmen to live 
in Trenton. So the Roeblings decided to build. 
Charles G. Roebling was then alive. The new 

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OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

site and the planning and building of the town 
were his charge. But, again, they didn't go 
looking for any welfare engineers. The whole 
job of planning plant and town alike was done 
in the long engineering room of the Roebling 
offices. At first they called the plant the 
Kinkora. They do yet, off and on, but the 
mills were a little below the station, and when 
the new venture was well under way, and the 
machinery had begun to squeeze out wire, and 
perhaps a hundred brick houses of various 
types had been erected, the place had to have 
a station of its own. The Pennsylvania Rail- 
road said it was Roebling, and stamped the 
tickets that way. Kinkora is wearing off. 
It is still a sleepy little station just up the line. 
Between it and Roebling there are a mile or so 
of distance and a whole century of time. 

The name "Kinkora" harks back to the year 
1000, when King "Brian Boru" of Ireland lost 
his life at the battle of Clontarf. His palace 
was named "Kinkora." In 1836 an ambitious 
Irishman named Rockefeller (not John D.) 
conceived the idea of an air line railroad from 
this spot where Roebling now stands to Atlantic 
City. In fond remembrance of Erin's Isle he 
named the terminus on the Delaware "Kinkora." 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

The enterprise itself died an early death. 

The Roebling Company has more than 200 
acres of land in the new settlement, enough, 
in all conscience, to accommodate as big a busi- 
ness as almost anyone would want to do, and 
houses to shelter all its workmen. If the com- 
pany should ever find it good business to shake 
the dust of Trenton from its shoes altogether 
it certainly has a place to go. 

NO TIME TO LET 
THE GRASS GROW 

From the day when the thing was decided 
on, no grass grew under anybody's feet. There 
was sand along that bucolic and undeveloped 
river bank, sand that ran well back, getting 
more and more like loam as you left the river. 
It was broken and uneven. The freshets of 
centuries had left hollows here and hummocks 
there. They were levelled. The knolls — dunes 
they would call them along Lake Michigan — 
were scraped down and dumped into the 
swales, and the excess was thrown into a sedgy 
morass along the river front, to make it into 
solid ground and give a clean, healthy shore, 
which is now one of the chief charms of the 
place. For the sections where grass was meant 
to grow — for dooryards and the like — tons 

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upon tons of "top soil" were brought in to give 
a fertile surface. 

The mill buildings went up first, on a broad 
space of one hundred acres levelled off for them, 
and then the town began to grow. That was 
sixteen years ago, and it has kept on growing. 
Every year sees a lot of new houses, of various 
values, and one and all well built and comely. 
And in all grades they are better houses than 
a workman, or a mill boss either, can get any- 
where else in America for the same money. 

TO MAKE A PROFIT 
BUT TO SHOW A SAVING 

That has been the doctrine from the begin- 
ning. Charles G. Roebling said at the time 
something to the effect that every workingman 
was a free moral agent, and didn't want to be 
tied to anybody's apron-strings, that he wanted 
a square deal and a chance to live his own life 
out of business hours, and to get the worth of 
his money when he spent it. "We purpose," 
he said, "to make a fair profit on our invest- 
ment, but we can do that and still show a man 
a saving. And we stop there." 

It doesn't take long to realize that the 
Roeblings are living up to the original schedule. 
The rents, the figures on all sorts of commodi- 

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ties at the "village store," which sells every- 
thing from a pork chop to a piano, and the drug 
store, which is just as "Riker-Hegeman" as any 
live town could wish, are all below the current 
price scale in the rest of the country, by a 
margin sufficient to mean something to a family 
when they "tote up" at the year's end. 

Electric light, coal and the other things a 
man has to pay for in any town are charged 
for here, but it doesn't take a legislative fight 
or a big row in the newspapers to keep the 
price down where a man can afford to pay it. 
Water is supplied free. The idea is that the 
man owes the company nothing but good work 
in return for his pay. After quitting time he's 
his own boss. The company tries to make life 
in the town pleasant enough so that he'll be 
glad to live there, and think he has a good job. 
And it recognizes that life has many sides. 

AND THE TOWN 
HAD A BAR 

It was in pursuance of the general thesis that 
when the town opened it had a hotel with a bar. 
"There's no use," they said, "in trying to make a 
mollycoddle out of a mill man. When he wants 
a drink he's going to get it, especially the foreign 
born. We don't propose to pick his drinks for 

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OUTSPINNING THE SpIDER 

him. If he wants whiskey it's a good sight 
better for us that he should be able to get it 
here like a human being than to trail into 
Trenton and take a chance with the stuff that 
goes over the bars where a workingman drinks. 
The whiskey here isn't gilt-edged, but it's 
decent, and it's worth what it costs." 

Prohibition settled the drink question, but 
while the cafe lasted in Roebling it kept the 
men from going to town to battle with the 
"embalming fluid," and not showing up for the 
customary three days. That too was good 
business. 

FIRE, POLICE, BANKS, 
STREETS 

After the dirt and noise and disorder of a 
city street, it is like a sedative to slip from the 
train into the peace and the wide spaces of 
Roebling. The tidy station is at one side, 
at the other, beyond the switch tracks, the 
little gate-house which gives ingress to the 
mill enclosure — if you have the proper kind of 
pass. From here a trim concrete walk leads on 
past the ground of the plant and its fence of 
tall pickets, toward the river, and the town. 
As you go, you meet with courtesy. It is not 
drawing the long bow to say everybody in 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

Roebling — outwardly at least — is civil and good 
natured. Just beyond the mill grounds you 
come upon the police office, with trig coppers 
who seem to have very little to do. Like 
the shining fire engines, which stand in the 
adjoining building ready for service either in 
town or plant, they seem to be maintained 
chiefly for insurance and ornament. But they 
are practical organizations at that. The Roebling 
Company learned what fire was during the 
war, when two of the biggest buildings in the 
Upper Works were destroyed. 

From this point the streets lead away, broad, 
clean streets with the best of sidewalks, and 
drainage. The town has spread out now so 
that it looks no more like a toy city. The 
streets are 80 feet wide, with the exception of 
Main Street and Fifth Avenue, which are 100 
feet wide. Trees have been planted which 
already make it attractive. In front of every 
house is a dooryard, a patch of green grass to 
remind a man that God made the world. 

HOUSES 

Adjoining fire and police houses, there was 
formerly a trim little bank whose business has 
expanded to such an extent that it has been 
enabled to move to the centre of the business 

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OUTSFINNING THE SpIDER 

section of the town in an attractive and up-to- 
date building of its own. 

The houses, while of widely different types, are 
for the most part made of brick. In order to 
avoid fire danger, the minimum of wood is used in 
all the buildings of the town. The houses are 
all constructed on the most improved plan of 
sanitation and hygiene. Through the block, 
giving access to the back-doors, run clean 
alleys, wide enough to allow wagons to pass 
for the delivery of coal, foodstuffs and other 
commodities, and for the collection of waste. 
The company is now halting between the erec- 
tion of an incinerator plant to consume the 
garbage for its 700 and odd homes, or a "hog 
farm" as part of its three or four hundred acres, 
which without difficulty could turn out 1,000 
to 2,000 head of swine a year, and further reduce 
the cost of living. It is possible, too, that it 
may some day produce its own milk. 

There is a marked difference between some of 
the houses first erected and those of more recent 
construction. At present the "bungalow" type 
is in great favor, since it facilitates the labor of 
housekeeping. More pretentious dwellings, for 
the men holding important positions in the 
plant, are sufficient to make a rent-ridden, 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

janitor-jaded, bell-boy bossed New Yorker 
wonder what he is being punished for. One 
handsome colonial home just built for a 
superintendent in one of the wire mills would 
be a credit to any commuter town. 

BASEBALL, RECREATION BUILDING, 
THEATRE, BALLROOM 

Always as you pass through airy Roebling 
you encounter some new institution built to 
make it seem like a regular place. There is 
a baseball ground which would be a credit to 
any city, with its tidy green grandstand and 
its carefully manicured diamond. The Wire 
Works team is now prominent in one of the 
State Leagues. There is a recreation building, 
with billiard and pool tables and the best 
bowling alleys that can be built. There is a 
spacious assembly hall, with theatre stage and 
a scrumptious curtain bearing a picture of the 
Roebling Brooklyn Bridge. The gallery is 
commodious. The seats are removable, leaving 
a ballroom of impressive size, and adjoining 
rooms are equipped with ranges, refrigerators 
and dishes for the preparation and service of 
suppers or of dinners great and small. 

Take notice of the hotel, the boarding houses 
where single men live well and cheaply, of the 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

public school, the hospital, the doctors, the 
nurses, the dispensary. And these last are 
busy functionaries. 

VERY LITTLE SICKNESS 
VERY MANY BABIES 

There is very little sickness in Roebling. 
The sanitation is studiously good, but when 
you are sick there they look after you, which 
is also "good business," and babies are a 
favorite form of diversion. This is impressively 
true. You sense it wherever you go. There 
are children everywhere — good looking whole- 
some "kids." And something makes them glad 
to live here, too. 

BEING A BOY SCOUT 
AT ROEBLING 

To be a boy scout in Roebling is about as 
good fun as a boy could have. For a long time 
the company gave the boys too much. Then 
it woke up to the fact that half the sport of 
being a boy scout was to do things. So the 
Scouts were told if they wanted to keep the 
perfectly corking club house on the river bank, 
with its big meeting room, its open mouthed 
fireplace, its mounted deer heads, and banners, 
and books and guns and spears and swords and 
all the other junk the boy soul loves, they'd 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

have to work for it. Goodness knows they do. 
The grounds around that shack in spring are 
turned up like a golf links. What they have 
done in the way of white birch rustic railings 
along the winding walks that lead to the grounds 
would make a Chippewa Indian sick with envy. 
This year they are to help build a long float 
from the club house to the water, to launch 
their canoes on. 

To the medical equipment is added a 
hospital for contagious diseases, standing away 
out in the fields. And in the outskirts also is 
land set apart for gardens, where the mill- 
workers have allotted plots of ground for the 
raising of their own vegetables. The manure 
from the stables, where sixty horses are kept, 
helps to make gardening worth while. Even 
to be a mule in Roebling is comfortable. There 
are old mules there — you see them just wander- 
ing around the paddocks, eating and growing 
older — that will never see thirty-five or forty 
again. Nobody ever will send them down the 
long trail. They have worked hard for the 
Roebling Company. It will feed them till 
they simply lie down and die of their own accord. 

Feeding — whether mules or people — is habi- 
tual. When John A. Roebling first made rope, 

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OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

he had three or four men working with him. 
They had a table in the shop. As the business 
has grown, this custom has continued. Today 
the entire office force at the headquarters in 
Trenton — some 230 persons of all ranks — gets 
a dinner every day that for sheer quality cannot 
be equalled in any of the city hotels. It may 
be a fad to feed that whole crowd fresh yellow 
cream brought in every morning from the 
Roebling farms, but — it's good business. 

THE PARK 

The high land on the bluff overlooking the 
river at Roebling is a park, with trees and 
benches, and a place where the band can play 
while the folks sit taking the air on a hot 
summer night. In a neat enclosure of Roebling 
wire, convenient to all parts of the town, are 
tennis courts, for general use. There is a sani- 
tary barber shop, where five shining chairs are 
always full. Roebling has the best barbered 
lot of foreign-born workmen in America. 

HOW THE FOREIGNER 
LIVES IN ROEBLING 

In a town like this are lessons for those who 
like to try to translate the foreigner for the good 
of American industry. There are those who 

[135] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

cherish a superstition that the foreign work- 
man in the United States lives poorly. In 
Roebling it is remarked that it is the foreigner 
who is the best customer in groceries and 
butcher's meat. He buys chickens instead of 
beef brisket, and not one chicken, but two and 
three. It is he also who buys the Hood River 
apples and the best grape fruit. 

And as for bread — you should see the bakery. 
"Sunny Jim" would sing to see it — clean and shin- 
ing, and turning out all kinds of bakestuffs besides 
the big round red-blond loaves of "European 
bread," which they say "has the strength" in 
it. The baker's wagon, loaded to the very top 
of the canvas cover, goes through the town 
and the workers' little children run homeward 
from it with two, three, four loaves altogether 
as big as themselves. Crescent rolls, which 
cost a nickel at a French bakery in New York, 
are sold here for two cents apiece. 

So it goes in Roebling. Over on the one side 
are the negro quarters. They have everything 
anybody else has including a recreation house 
— and when they recreate, they just recreate. 



If Roebling was an experiment, it is not so 
any longer. It is full of comfortable people, 

[136] 



OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER 

and in seventy years the Roebling theory as 
to what a workman wants and how he should 
be treated has never proved itself more con- 
clusively than here. It is a suggestive fact 
that in all that time, save for some insignifi- 
cant incidents, the Roeblings have been free 
from the nightmare of "labor troubles." It 
may be because its workmen have nothing worth 
while to complain of. Every effort is made to 
make them comfortable without making them 
feel like dependents. 

It is the outworking of a great business theory. 
In these times it is of impressive significance. 



11371 



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''^,\- 




